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 patches@lists.linux.dev 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.
See also: Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
This may legitimately be one of the most damaging moments in western hegemony moving forward. The one area where BRICS and other non-westerm blocs have not made major strides to dissociate from the west is Linux; even North Korea uses its own Linux distro domestically. A large part of the reason for that is that it’s traditionally been seen as such a stable and generally apolitical kernel that the usual worries about spyware in your firmware isn’t as big of a concern, so China and Russia don’t have major concerns about leveraging the kernel for their domestic industries. Hell, Russian programmers have been massive players in open source development traditionally.
This is fire across the bow for Russia, and you can be sure some bureaucrat in Beijing is taking notes right now.
Is the open source movement even viable without highly skilled but underemployed Russian technical labor?
For real, even in game communities we’ve had several Russian contributors reverse engineer entire game engines.
The West seems to be doing whatever it can to accelerate its decline.
American hard power is about to be hard countered, so America’s massive amount of soft power could provide a nice floor to keep a comfortable position on the world stage after its coercion mechanisms are thwarted. But they keep trying to weaponize their best means of post-multipolar relevancy.
Using the Linux kernel to push their short term geopolitical objectives is about as large of an unforced error as can be made.
Having the most developed open source ecosystem gives the US & EU disproportionate influence over the direction of the technology sphere; an advantage adversaries are incentivized to avoid trying to circumvent because no one wants to waste time reinventing the wheel.
Yeah, it’ll probably slow Russian technological development a little for awhile until non-Western ecosystems mature, but this will hurt the West far more in the long run than the relative edge they get over Russia.
Any countries not explicitly Western-aligned will see the writing on the wall and take steps to build homegrown alternatives that can’t be used for leverage over them…and they can start just by forking the Western projects.
Russia, China, India, Brasil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia will comprise a vast majority of software developers, and their projects will inevitably outpace their Western counterparts as more countries develop, especially if this trend of wielding FOSS as a geopolitical coercion tool continues.
What happens when China has a runaway technological edge and decides to take giant strides to build and migrate their products/systems to a homegrown kernel?..now 30%+ of global manufacturing is built without consideration for Linux compatibility and interop. Soon any software wishing to take advantage of top hardware begins to target this new kernel and Linux kernel support becomes an afterthought. Shortly after, new APIs and programming languages are built to target these platforms, with bad/no localization to Latin & Germanic languages, possibly even using hanzi or cyrillic instead of latin characters. Then you wind up a tech ecosystem where cultural factors disadvantage Westerners instead of the opposite in the current status quo.
Throwing away global leadership to take cheap shots at Russia.
Meanwhile, Russian devs & Russian companies will make sockpuppet personas and accounts, fork the kernel, and ignore licensing since they’re gonna be blocked from Western markets regardless.
Like with every failed colonial war, the losing side gets more and more desperate for a “final victory” in some grand counter offensive or wonder weapon or other bold strategy.
Every time, it is a massive gamble that has a massive cost at the slim chance of a reward. At some point, sunk cost fallacy kicks in and everything becomes potential ammunition to throw at the enemy.
Russia also uses one in some portions of its state.