Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."

Mikhail Novosyolov
2024-10-24T21:12:13Z

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Linus, Greg,

First of all thanks to you for taking by far not the most harmful actions to achieve what your lawyers very kindly asked you to do.

Unfortunately, already a lot of highly qualified people have started thinking that you acted very badly. Of course, there are questions like why removed maintainers were not properly notified and did not receive any additional explanations, but, to my mind, it is useless to try to find 100% justice -- it is not possible. Overton windows has been opened a bit more.

Usually the first contribution is much harder to make then the following ones. A big problem here is that now many people even will not try to contribute to the Linux kernel and other open source projects: their pride for themselves, their homeland, their colleagues has been severely hurt (we are ready to fight for all that).

It is not clear what to do with this problem. Any ideas?

I am sure that people from any country and of any nationality will have similar feelings if you act with them or their colleagues in a similar way.

Thanks to people who were not afraid to say something against this action. Chinese, Latin American, African and other people probably understand that they may be the next ones to be dropped from maintainers. Hope that we will not have to form another Linux kernel upstream one day...

I am sorry that you have to read a lot of text from people who you call trolls -- it is hard to keep calm.

You know, you have really made it much harder to motivate people to contribute into the kernel. There is such problem among developers of hardware that they do not feel comfortable enough to show their code, for example because they think that it is not perfect. Let’s take Baikal Electronics. They do publish their kernel code, but in a form of tarballs without git. They slowly, but constantly worked on contributing support of their hardware into the upstream kernel, fixing not Baikal-related bugs by the way. One day someone told them that “we are not comfortable with accepting your patches”. And they stopped their work on upstream. Now that man has been removed from maintainers of previously contributed code (code for not Russian hardware, by the way).

What do I suggest to do? Well, I don’t know, but I do not see direct legal reasons why doing this was required and why patches from Baikal could not be accepted (the fact that I do not see does not mean that they do not exist, but please show them). Politicians and activists can be shown a finger in some places, by both developers and lawyers, at least to prevent them from being too ambitious, when they decide to break something working next time... But maybe I do not know something about truly democratic regimes :-)

Thanks for reading.