Official statement regarding recent Greg’ commit 6e90b675cf942e from Serge Semin

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. I won’t cite the exact emails text since it was a private messaging, but the key words are “sanctions”, “sorry”, “nothing I can do”, “talk to your (company) lawyer”… I can’t say for all the guys affected by the change, but my work for the community has been purely volunteer for more than a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the patch has been merged in I don’t really want to now. Silently, behind everyone’s back, bypassing the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified - it’s indeed the worse way to do what has been done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but haven’t we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..

I can’t believe the kernel senior maintainers didn’t consider that the patch wouldn’t go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what’s done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might be sanctioned…), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like me.

Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though). But before saying goodbye I’d like to express my gratitude to all the community members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.

  • Agent KaryoEnglish
    1•2 hours ago

    but claiming someone in Russia who doesn’t stand against Putin is “complicit” in the war is rough.

    An alternative viewpoint from someone who has lived in North America and russia for a decade (and speaks both russian and English).

    Most Westerns have a pretty primitive and naive understanding of russian culture; you will note how even seemingly reputable analysts that consult senior US diplomatic figures speak in broken russian.

    Westerner greatly underestimate the extend to which genocidal imperialism is supported within russian society. Not every single person of course. We are talking strong majority to overwhelming majority support that goes across multiple demographic segments (even ones you wouldn’t think would have majority support like younger cohorts or highly educated cohorts).

    Consider the annexation of Crimea, which if you live in Ukraine, was the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. 80-85% support depending methodology (just a few percentage point delta when using list experiments vs. direct questions).

    And don’t be naive in thinking that russian society does not recognize the genocidal intent. They most definitely know that Ukrainian is banned, Ukrainian churches are banned, you cannot do anything without getting a russian. Tens of thousands of Ukrainins who have the courage to openly oppose this regime are sent to torture dungeons where electrocution torture, cutting off genitals, cutting off fingers, rape, is all a standard procedure.

    And russians society knows this, yet they continue to strongly support the invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Georgia (how many russians protested the 2008 invasion?) and Moldova.

    Now one might say I am de-humanizing russians. To that I will answer that I am actually treating them as adults that make their own choices and should take responsibility for their actions. There is nothing inherent (in a biological or some sort of cultural essentialism sense) to russian culture that enables imperialism to or makes propaganda effective. It’s a conscious choice made unfortunately by at least a strong majority of russian society.

    This is not directly aimed at you, more of a general comment regarding naive and honestly uneducated takes on the nature of russian society.