First of all, saying “based on their country of residence” is either grossly uninformed or (most probably) plain dishonest.
Ignoring that, the GPL-freedoms of companies subject to sanctions are still preserved, so… having established that your “free” is not the same “free” as in “free and open source software”, what the hell are you talking about?
First, you’re acting like the decision was made by Linus or another member of the team and that they weren’t following the law.
Second, even if that weren’t the case, it’s still completely free. Unless you can name one of the following freedoms that was impacted by those actions:
- Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
- Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
- Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
- Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
All of those freedoms were directly impacted bozo.
And as for “Linus didn’t do it”, not only did they choose to comply with an order that directly violated the GPL, but in doing so he then followed up by gloating about Russian maintainers who have worked diligently on the kernel for years for the betterment of open software AND Linus’ paycheck.
Calling your former volunteer contributors bots and state assets because of their home country is just straight up racist, especially when the only evidence of state-sponsored tampering in the Kernel has come from American institutions (that we even know of).
Literally none of those freedoms were impacted. Everyone is still free to use the program as they wish, fork it, make changes, etc… Linux doesn’t have a new license that says “anyone but Russians” can use it.
he then followed up by gloating about Russian maintainers
How did he gloat? He explained the change. If your complaint is that he was abrasive, I feel like you’re not familiar with Linus.
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.
Sounds a lot more like he’s frustrated than delighted to me.
Calling your former volunteer contributors bots
He didn’t call the contributors bots.
He called the people submitting reverts and complaining about those maintainers, who weren’t contributors themselves, “troll farm accounts.”
and state assets because of their home country
When did he call anyone a state asset? To be clear, being a troll or a paid actor doesn’t make you someone’s property.
He also explained that this was a legal matter:
> Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
> these countries?
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.
