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
Comrade, I’m merely pointing out that binary blobs have been the bane of open source for decades and my ass is old enough to remember when the original debate about accepting them or rejecting them originally happened. Some, like mainline Linux accepted then, while more hardcore folks like Theo de Raat from OpenBSD refused to accept them, and wireless drivers for a decade were absolutely shit until everyone reverse engineered the broadcom drivers.
I’m merely stating that a fork needs to be more substantial than just deleting a bunch of binary drivers and saying boom I now have my own fork of the Linux kernel.
I mean I could delete all the Linux fiber channel drivers and claim that I have a fork of Linux but that’s not notable
it’s still a useful thing to have exist even if it doesn’t meet your arbitrary standard of a “real” fork
for people that aren’t severe linux-heads, recreating what they’ve done and producing a working kernel without blobs and such would be non-trivial to impossible.