EDIT: I apologize to everyone who has so far read this comment. I misunderstood what Linus Torvalds meant in the interview I mentioned. I thought he was just calling the Russian kernel contributors “Internet trolls”, be he was actually referring to Russian “troll farms” taking advantage of the controversy generated by how the Linux Foundation removed the Russian devs from kernel development without saying a word, to entice outrage and try to get the Foundation’s decision reversed. (afaik they had to do it because the US government ordered them to, and the foundation is hosted in the US.) I’m leaving the post in its original form for posterity.

I think the way Torvalds treated the Russian kernel maintainers that got silently removed from development (a situation that, by itself, was completely mishandled) was awful to say the least. In a interview, he said they were all Internet trolls, and referenced conflicts between Finland and Russia to “explain” his disdain for Russians. Say what you want, but I usually call a person that judges others based on their country of birth alone, an asshole. Not just that, but such behaviour sounds extremely ungrateful when we are talking about people who contributed in extremely important ways to Torvalds’ biggest project of his life. I used to have a positive view of Torvalds, but this kind of ruined it for me.