Torvalds sounds unhinged here:
Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change anything.
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.
If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam.
As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.
Another maintainer commented:
We finally got clearance to publish the actual advice:
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.
But why would a global project that isn't based in the US and is led by a Finn cuck to US sanctions? Gay.
SithEmpire 0 points 6 months ago
The sanctions reasoning doesn't track, although there is a very real underlying threat to be mitigated by refusing Russian contributions.
Even if a kernel developer has been reputable for years, the trouble is that the intelligence service of a country at war has captive access and a massive motivation for compromising such a person.
Albeit the most important software component, it's also not just the kernel which needs guarding; as we saw with the xz archive utility recently, very popular programs bundled with every distribution become desirable attack vectors. Bash must be an obvious target for compromised developers, but I bet it's more niche stuff like tmux which must be prime value for adding a backdoor, that would see thousands of compromised servers.