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Western Sanctions Regime Reaches the Linux Kernel (lwn.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel's MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the [email protected] mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention.

The explanation for the removal is simply ""various compliance requirements"". Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries.

An early comment likely pins down the prevailing institutional pressures leading to this decision

What's the deal with an international project adhering to what is obviously a decision of the US government?

Hint: The Linux Foundation (which notably employs Greg KH and Torvalds, and provides a lot of the legal and other infrastructure for this "international project") is based in the US, and therefore has to follow US laws.

This is pretty fucked up. Like, we might see the kernel forked in the coming months/years.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Before I heard this yesterday, the same day I was thinking I would like to make my own operating system that was kernel-agnostic, (Free/Open/etc.)BSD and Linux (and maybe Hurd) as supported kernels, combined Gentoo and Guix's features, removed Python has a hard dependency (which includes glibc, for example, as it needs Python to compile), and prioritized being built with only fast languages, probably with a focus on Zig, Rust, C, and Racket/Chez Scheme, enabling a very minimal distro. It would eventually allow packages like Python to be supported, but the idea was to make a distro that could be stripped down further than even Gentoo and have a package manager built in a fast language. I would probably need to support musl (which on Gentoo has a crypt use flag for libxcrypt, which depends on Python, though I believe it's for running tests), µClibc, Cosmopolitan Libc, or work on my own fork of some libc instead of glibc.

With this news, this hobby project that I hoped to make a living from donations seems important now in regards to supporting BSD.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Can someone make a video on what this means in practice?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In practice it means that some maintainers to the Linux kernel have been removed. It's a fucked up thing to do but in and of itself would likely not achieve any particular effect either way. Just a worrying direction for the official kernel to go down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What is a maintaner?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

They're the people who take the code from thousands of developers, check it for errors, make sure there are no regressions, coordinate the code with the patches from other maintainers from further up and down the tree, and finally herd the patches toward the mainline, as well as manage backports.

It's essentially another term for developer, but a developer which maintains/administrates a project and analyzes, coordinates, and governs the patches (changes to code) that are applied to a project, especially a large one like Linux, Rust, Git, etc. where multiple maintainers are needed.

https://docs.kernel.org/maintainer/feature-and-driver-maintainers.html

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

So, banning maintainers who are russian means what in the long term? What were they contributing before?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
> Hello Linux-kernel community,
>
> I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg'
> commit 6e90b675cf942e ("MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to
> various compliance requirements."). As you may have noticed the
> change concerned some of the Ru-related developers removal from the
> list of the official kernel maintainers, including me.
>
> The community members rightly noted that the quite short commit log
> contained very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No
> matter how hard I tried to get more details about the reason, alas
> the senior maintainer I was discussing the matter with haven't given
> an explanation to what compliance requirements that was.

Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled. A summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

In your specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list. If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's the documentation Greg is looking for.

I would also like to thank you for all your past contributions and if you (or anyone else) would like an entry in the credit file, I'm happy to shepherd it for you if you send me what you'd like.

Again, we're really sorry it's come to this, but all of the Linux infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't ignore the requirements of US law. We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won't also have to remove any existing patches.

Regards,

James Bottomley

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