The discussion around this has been physically painful to read. From what I gather, the delisted maintainers are people on sanction lists, i.e. somehow connected to the Russian state, and they have been given the opportunity to prove their innocence by providing some (admittedly unspecified) documents to Linus and the Linux Foundation.

Judging by Linus’s updated comment in that article there are legal concerns involved, as the Linux Foundation is a US-based organization. Though even if they weren’t, it is the morally correct thing to do to give Russian state actors the boot.

No, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to go into the details that I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.

I’m also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them.

I was just banned from lemmy.ml for not enthusiastically supporting Russia/Putin on the .ml version of this community, which has this same submission lol.

Let’s hope this discussion doesn’t also get brigaded with people supporting the Russian state.