linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[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. Specifically:

NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel upstream
work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very tough reviews
with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back then. That
experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since then I've got
several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If not for you
it wouldn't have been possible.

Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my Linux kernel
journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my DW I2C
driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here and there -
GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s. Quite heat
discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the time we
managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit the
discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never refused to
provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even though you
didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to reviewers
and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel knowledges and all
the tips and tricks you shared.

* Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my DW DMAC
fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably working with the
DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/

Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy patchset in you
suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It was a first
time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the trust. I'll
never forget that.

Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver maintenance to
me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less errors-prune,
especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or working in the
mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of DW
SPI-controller users since then.

Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform and DW AHCI
SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path. But still
all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the patches
were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience I've got from
the reviews.

Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list during my
MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was always a
pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the field. Alas
I've spent too much time working on the patches for another subsystems and
failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my promise, but
as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own deadline.

Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of the DW
PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review another patches
for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to work with
you.  Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver maintenance. I
think we were doing a great work together.

Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem and
particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have turned to be a
kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has stopped. I really
hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and DW XPCS
patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell might
disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful after all,
at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together with Russell
on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to finish it up
after all. 

Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most hardwary part
of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have been laconic
and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank you very
much for that.

Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the hwmon and
watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.

Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC patches even
got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the time
you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.

* Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC patchsets
anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the work it
would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches convert the
mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the generic DW
uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on that
controller.

Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my patches sent
for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was straight,
highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.
Thank you very much for that.

Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to meet in the
kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the time spent
for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a pleasure to
meet you here.

I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to
defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in
these days. It means a lot.

A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:

Signed-off patches:		518
Reviewed and Acked patches:	253
Tested patches:			80

You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing to some
other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.

I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation regarding the
drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys IP-cores
(about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time), feel free to
reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the community
members.

Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.

Best Regards,
-Serge(y)

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello Serge!
I do not have many contributions to show to give it extra weight nor do
I actually know you.
Nevertheless I still wanted to say thank you for your nice message even if
it is for a sad occasion, and share your sentiment of hoping
for more pleasant circumstances.

Best regards,
Reimar

(and apologies if anyone is annoyed by the wide CC list, but I think it's
important for at least some thank yous to be public and nobody else seems
to have written one yet)

> On 24 Oct 2024, at 06:27, Serge Semin <fancer.lancer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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. Specifically:
> 
> NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel upstream
> work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very tough reviews
> with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back then. That
> experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since then I've got
> several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If not for you
> it wouldn't have been possible.
> 
> Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my Linux kernel
> journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my DW I2C
> driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here and there -
> GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s. Quite heat
> discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the time we
> managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit the
> discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never refused to
> provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even though you
> didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to reviewers
> and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel knowledges and all
> the tips and tricks you shared.
> 
> * Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my DW DMAC
> fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably working with the
> DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/
> 
> Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy patchset in you
> suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It was a first
> time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the trust. I'll
> never forget that.
> 
> Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver maintenance to
> me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less errors-prune,
> especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or working in the
> mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of DW
> SPI-controller users since then.
> 
> Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform and DW AHCI
> SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path. But still
> all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the patches
> were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience I've got from
> the reviews.
> 
> Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list during my
> MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was always a
> pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the field. Alas
> I've spent too much time working on the patches for another subsystems and
> failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my promise, but
> as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own deadline.
> 
> Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of the DW
> PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review another patches
> for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to work with
> you.  Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver maintenance. I
> think we were doing a great work together.
> 
> Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem and
> particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have turned to be a
> kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has stopped. I really
> hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and DW XPCS
> patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell might
> disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful after all,
> at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together with Russell
> on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to finish it up
> after all. 
> 
> Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most hardwary part
> of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have been laconic
> and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank you very
> much for that.
> 
> Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the hwmon and
> watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.
> 
> Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC patches even
> got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the time
> you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.
> 
> * Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC patchsets
> anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the work it
> would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches convert the
> mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the generic DW
> uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on that
> controller.
> 
> Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my patches sent
> for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was straight,
> highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.
> Thank you very much for that.
> 
> Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to meet in the
> kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the time spent
> for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a pleasure to
> meet you here.
> 
> I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to
> defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in
> these days. It means a lot.
> 
> A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:
> 
> Signed-off patches: 518
> Reviewed and Acked patches: 253
> Tested patches: 80
> 
> You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing to some
> other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.
> 
> I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation regarding the
> drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys IP-cores
> (about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time), feel free to
> reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the community
> members.
> 
> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
> Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.
> 
> Best Regards,
> -Serge(y)
> 

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Philipp Stanner]

On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
> 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.

I'm also quite shocked and even baffled about how this has been
handled. This is not how leaders should communicate difficult or big
decisions. It's the most disappointing event I have witnessed in the
project.

There is the form and there is the content – about the content one
cannot do much, when the state he or his organization resides in gives
an order.

But about the form one can indeed do much. No "Thank you!", no "I hope
we can work together again once the world has become sane(r)"... srsly,
what the hell.

No idea why they felt the need to do it that way, but it certainly is
not the open source way, neither is it decent or honorable.


That said, thank you for all your work, Serge!

I believe that nothing that has been accomplished with a candid mindset
and decent intentions is ever done for nothing, although it often pays
off way differently than expected.
So I hope this will be the case for you, too.

Take care,
Philipp


> 
> 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.
> Specifically:
> 
> NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel
> upstream
> work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very
> tough reviews
> with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back
> then. That
> experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since
> then I've got
> several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If
> not for you
> it wouldn't have been possible.
> 
> Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my
> Linux kernel
> journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my
> DW I2C
> driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here
> and there -
> GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s.
> Quite heat
> discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the
> time we
> managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit
> the
> discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never
> refused to
> provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even
> though you
> didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to
> reviewers
> and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel
> knowledges and all
> the tips and tricks you shared.
> 
> * Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my
> DW DMAC
> fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably
> working with the
> DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:
> Link:
> https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/
> 
> Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy
> patchset in you
> suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It
> was a first
> time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the
> trust. I'll
> never forget that.
> 
> Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver
> maintenance to
> me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less
> errors-prune,
> especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or
> working in the
> mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of
> DW
> SPI-controller users since then.
> 
> Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform
> and DW AHCI
> SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path.
> But still
> all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the
> patches
> were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience
> I've got from
> the reviews.
> 
> Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list
> during my
> MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was
> always a
> pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the
> field. Alas
> I've spent too much time working on the patches for another
> subsystems and
> failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my
> promise, but
> as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own
> deadline.
> 
> Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of
> the DW
> PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review
> another patches
> for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to
> work with
> you.  Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver
> maintenance. I
> think we were doing a great work together.
> 
> Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem
> and
> particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have
> turned to be a
> kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has
> stopped. I really
> hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and
> DW XPCS
> patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell
> might
> disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful
> after all,
> at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together
> with Russell
> on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to
> finish it up
> after all. 
> 
> Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most
> hardwary part
> of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have
> been laconic
> and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank
> you very
> much for that.
> 
> Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the
> hwmon and
> watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.
> 
> Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC
> patches even
> got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the
> time
> you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.
> 
> * Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC
> patchsets
> anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the
> work it
> would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches
> convert the
> mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the
> generic DW
> uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on
> that
> controller.
> 
> Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my
> patches sent
> for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was
> straight,
> highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.
> Thank you very much for that.
> 
> Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to
> meet in the
> kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the
> time spent
> for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a
> pleasure to
> meet you here.
> 
> I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to
> defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in
> these days. It means a lot.
> 
> A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:
> 
> Signed-off patches:		518
> Reviewed and Acked patches:	253
> Tested patches:			80
> 
> You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing
> to some
> other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.
> 
> I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation
> regarding the
> drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys
> IP-cores
> (about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time),
> feel free to
> reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the
> community
> members.
> 
> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
> Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.
> 
> Best Regards,
> -Serge(y)
> 

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Jiaxun Yang]

在2024年10月24日十月 上午5:27，Serge Semin写道：
> 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.

Hi Serge,

I was shocked by the way senior maintainers handle that patch when people put it
under my radar. Then I scroll down it and see all those familiar names including
Sergey Shtylyov and you...

This is certainly not the way things should be done. Even if legal requirements
necessitate the action, there are far better ways to handle it. Instead, the most
absurd and shameful option has been chosen.

It's deeply disappointing to me that, when doubts were raised about the process,
Linus resorted to personal attacks rather than addressing our concerns. As a hobbyist
driven by the ideals of free software, with Linus as a role model, I now find myself
questioning my own beliefs.

Where are we going? Where should we go?

>
[...]
>
> Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list during my
> MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was always a
> pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the field. Alas
> I've spent too much time working on the patches for another subsystems and
> failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my promise, but
> as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own deadline.

Thank you, Serge. It's always a pleasure working with you. Your professionalism has
been truly impressive, and our discussions were consistently constructive. I
especially appreciate how your bug reports and review comments are always backed by
detailed reasoning, it really stood out to me.

You'll be missed. I'll see what I can do here for your work on MIPS.

>
[...]
>
> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
> Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.

I'm happy to have a pint with you if we can meet someday.

For now, take care.

Thanks
>
> Best Regards,
> -Serge(y)

-- 
- Jiaxun

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
> 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.

Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled.  A
summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is

   If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC
   sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our
   ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and
   you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

In your specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list. 
If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's
the documentation Greg is looking for.

I would also like to thank you for all your past contributions and if
you (or anyone else) would like an entry in the credit file, I'm happy
to shepherd it for you if you send me what you'd like.

Again, we're really sorry it's come to this, but all of the Linux
infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't
ignore the requirements of US law.  We are hoping that this action
alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in
charge of sanctions and we won't also have to remove any existing
patches.

Regards,

James Bottomley

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Jiaxun Yang]

在2024年10月24日十月 下午3:50，James Bottomley写道：
> On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
>> Hello Linux-kernel community,
[...]

Hi James,

Sorry to chime in here, and thanks for making things clear.

However, I have some questions regarding this statement, please see below:

> Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled.  A
> summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is

In what capacity this statement was made, i.e, who is "our" here and "we"
below? Are you representing any formal group in this case?

>
>    If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC
>    sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our
>    ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and
>    you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
>
> Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:
>
> https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

I did a quick search and found the following entry:

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Under CMIC-EO13959 sanction program.

Although it's a Non-SDN sanction, it can still be interpreted as
"subject to an OFAC sanctions program".

How should we handle it?

>
[...]
>
> Again, we're really sorry it's come to this, but all of the Linux
> infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't
> ignore the requirements of US law.  We are hoping that this action
> alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in
> charge of sanctions and we won't also have to remove any existing
> patches.

I truly appreciate that someone has finally addressed the underlying issue.
I understand the importance of protecting infrastructure and maintainers from
potential legal threats by ensuring compliance. My intent in asking these
questions is not to place anyone in a difficult position, but simply to gain a
better understanding of the situation, so I can take appropriate action to
keep everyone safe.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to any sanctioned body, and I'm a resident
of UK.

Thanks

>
> Regards,
>
> James Bottomley

-- 
- Jiaxun

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Dragan Milivojević]

>
> HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Under CMIC-EO13959 sanction program.
>
> Although it's a Non-SDN sanction, it can still be interpreted as
> "subject to an OFAC sanctions program".
>
> How should we handle it?

It has already been "handled" using the same vague justifications
with a cherry on top: some good old American bigotry and supremacy about the
"free world".

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241024032637.34286-1-quake.wang@gmail.com/

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 16:59 +0100, Jiaxun Yang wrote:
> 
> 
> 在2024年10月24日十月 下午3:50，James Bottomley写道：
> > On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
> > > Hello Linux-kernel community,
> [...]
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> Sorry to chime in here, and thanks for making things clear.
> 
> However, I have some questions regarding this statement, please see
> below:
> 
> > Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled.  A
> > summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is
> 
> In what capacity this statement was made, i.e, who is "our" here and
> "we" below? Are you representing any formal group in this case?

It's Linux, so no official capacity at all.  However, I am expressing
the views of a number of people I talked to but it's not fair of me to
name them.

> >    If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an
> > OFAC
> >    sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list,
> > our
> >    ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions,
> > and
> >    you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
> > 
> > Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:
> > 
> > https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
> 
> I did a quick search and found the following entry:
> 
> HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Under CMIC-EO13959 sanction program.
> 
> Although it's a Non-SDN sanction, it can still be interpreted as
> "subject to an OFAC sanctions program".
> 
> How should we handle it?

A big chunk of the reason it's taken so long just to get the above is
that the Lawyers (of which I'm not one) are still discussing the
specifics and will produce a much longer policy document later, so they
don't want to be drawn into questions like this.  However, my non-
legal-advice rule of thumb that I'm applying until I hear otherwise is
not on the SDN list, not a problem.

James

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Peter Cai]

Hi James,

Thanks for your clarification. This sort of non-provocative 
clarifications of the regulations you need to comply to has always been 
what the community wants to see. _This_ should have been the first 
official statement when anyone raised the concern, instead of Greg's 
attempt to "defuse" the situation over private correspondence, or Linus 
Torvald's outright defamation and accusing anyone who dares to disagree 
of being a "Russian troll". This is not even to mention the _complete 
ignorance_ and arrogance shown by his statement on what sending a revert 
patch means.

With sanctions in place, there is no reasonable person who will demand 
the LF or the Linux Kernel maintainers to do otherwise. However, as 
someone who does rely on Linux for daily work, and as someone who has 
contributed to the Linux project and its community, I think seeing the 
following should be the minimum:

1. Linus Torvalds (+Cc) send an apology letter to **everyone** who he 
accused of being a Russian troll;
2. Linus Torvalds need to **unconditionally retract** his personal 
attack on Kexy Biscuit, the person who sent the revert patch in protest 
(+Cc), and acknowledge that people who work with AOSC.io aren't 
"state-sponsored paid actors";
3. This type of statement should be included somewhere public as soon as 
practically possible should sanction compliance affect kernel 
development again in the future;
4. No personal attacks should be allowed based on tinfoil-hat reasoning.

Thanks,
Peter.

On 10/24/24 10:50 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled.  A
> summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is
> 
>     If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC
>     sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our
>     ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and
>     you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:
> 
> https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
> 
> In your specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list.
> If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's
> the documentation Greg is looking for.
> 
> I would also like to thank you for all your past contributions and if
> you (or anyone else) would like an entry in the credit file, I'm happy
> to shepherd it for you if you send me what you'd like.
> 
> Again, we're really sorry it's come to this, but all of the Linux
> infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't
> ignore the requirements of US law.  We are hoping that this action
> alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in
> charge of sanctions and we won't also have to remove any existing
> patches.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> James Bottomley
> 

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Hantong Chen]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3482 bytes --]

> 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.

Hi James,

Here's what Linus has said, and it's more than just "sanction."

Moreover, we have to remove any maintainers who come from the following countries or regions, as they are listed in *Countries of Particular Concern* and are subject to impending sanctions:

- Burma, People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
- Algeria, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic, Comoros, and Vietnam.

For People’s Republic of China, there are about 500 entities that are on the U.S. OFAC SDN / non-SDN lists, especially HUAWEI, which is one of the most active employers from versions 5.16 through 6.1, according to statistics. This is unacceptable, and we must take immediate action to address it, with the **same** reason.

On 10/24/24 10:50 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 07:27 +0300, Serge Semin wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled.  A
> summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is
> 
>     If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC
>     sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our
>     ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and
>     you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:
> 
> https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
> 
> In your specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list.
> If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's
> the documentation Greg is looking for.
> 
> I would also like to thank you for all your past contributions and if
> you (or anyone else) would like an entry in the credit file, I'm happy
> to shepherd it for you if you send me what you'd like.
> 
> Again, we're really sorry it's come to this, but all of the Linux
> infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can't
> ignore the requirements of US law.  We are hoping that this action
> alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in
> charge of sanctions and we won't also have to remove any existing
> patches.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> James Bottomley
> 

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Jiaxun Yang]

在2024年10月24日十月 下午5:27，James Bottomley写道：
> On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 16:59 +0100, Jiaxun Yang wrote:
[...]

Hi James,

>
> It's Linux, so no official capacity at all.  However, I am expressing
> the views of a number of people I talked to but it's not fair of me to
> name them.

Fair enough, I was hoping that it's from Linux Foundation but it's still
good news to me that it do represent some respectful individuals.

>
[...]
>> How should we handle it?
>
> A big chunk of the reason it's taken so long just to get the above is
> that the Lawyers (of which I'm not one) are still discussing the
> specifics and will produce a much longer policy document later, so they
> don't want to be drawn into questions like this.  However, my non-
> legal-advice rule of thumb that I'm applying until I hear otherwise is
> not on the SDN list, not a problem.

Thank you for sharing your insights. I'm looking forward to the document.

While I remain quite upset about how things were handled, your message has
helped restore some of my confidence in the community.

I agree with Peter Cai's earlier comment that steps should be taken to address
the harm caused by the initial reckless actions, particularly to those who were
humiliated.

It is also important to put measures in place to prevent such drama from recurring.
A formal procedure for handling urgent compliance requests may be a sensible step
forward.

I hold our community in high regard and would be heartbreaking to see the reputation
of the Linux Kernel undermined in such an unfortunate manner. I would appreciate it
if you could convey those thoughts to the relevant individuals.

Thanks
>
> James

-- 
- Jiaxun

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Dragan Milivojević]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 at 18:31, Peter Cai <peter@typeblog.net> wrote:
>
> Hi James,
>
> Thanks for your clarification. This sort of non-provocative
> clarifications of the regulations you need to comply to has always been
> what the community wants to see. _This_ should have been the first
> official statement when anyone raised the concern, instead of Greg's
> attempt to "defuse" the situation over private correspondence, or Linus
> Torvald's outright defamation and accusing anyone who dares to disagree
> of being a "Russian troll". This is not even to mention the _complete
> ignorance_ and arrogance shown by his statement on what sending a revert
> patch means.
>
> With sanctions in place, there is no reasonable person who will demand
> the LF or the Linux Kernel maintainers to do otherwise. However, as
> someone who does rely on Linux for daily work, and as someone who has
> contributed to the Linux project and its community, I think seeing the
> following should be the minimum:
>
> 1. Linus Torvalds (+Cc) send an apology letter to **everyone** who he
> accused of being a Russian troll;
> 2. Linus Torvalds need to **unconditionally retract** his personal
> attack on Kexy Biscuit, the person who sent the revert patch in protest
> (+Cc), and acknowledge that people who work with AOSC.io aren't
> "state-sponsored paid actors";
> 3. This type of statement should be included somewhere public as soon as
> practically possible should sanction compliance affect kernel
> development again in the future;
> 4. No personal attacks should be allowed based on tinfoil-hat reasoning.
>
> Thanks,
> Peter.
>

That list is great but it will never happen, Linus is high on his
western supremacy complex.
Most of the anger (including mine) comes from people who have just
realized what kind of a person Linus is.

He has exposed his lack of morals and inability of self reflection
with the trolls comment.
He has exposed his ignorance, coming from his state media
brainwashing, with the media comment.
He has exposed his ignorance, arrogance and blatant Russophobia with
his "I'm Finish" comment, as if
Finland has any high moral ground when it comes to WWII (for the
historically ignorant: Finnish "concentration camps").

And this is not over, there are plenty of other countries and entities
on the official USA enemies list.
The real majority of the world, all of us outside the USA and their
vassal states, their so called "free world" (one maintainer
actually used that blatant display of American supremacy in a commit
removing Huawei maintainers) are looking at this
with sadness and anger.
The Cold War 2.0 has came to the Linux world and as in the first one,
the Iron curtain has been erected
by those that claim moral high ground with their false values of
freedom, openes, merit etc.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Jiaxun Yang]

在2024年10月24日十月 下午5:30，Peter Cai写道：
> Hi James,
>
> Thanks for your clarification. This sort of non-provocative 
> clarifications of the regulations you need to comply to has always been 
> what the community wants to see. _This_ should have been the first 
> official statement when anyone raised the concern, instead of Greg's 
> attempt to "defuse" the situation over private correspondence, or Linus 
> Torvald's outright defamation and accusing anyone who dares to disagree 
> of being a "Russian troll". This is not even to mention the _complete 
> ignorance_ and arrogance shown by his statement on what sending a revert 
> patch means.
>
> With sanctions in place, there is no reasonable person who will demand 
> the LF or the Linux Kernel maintainers to do otherwise. However, as 
> someone who does rely on Linux for daily work, and as someone who has 
> contributed to the Linux project and its community, I think seeing the 
> following should be the minimum:
>
> 1. Linus Torvalds (+Cc) send an apology letter to **everyone** who he 
> accused of being a Russian troll;
> 2. Linus Torvalds need to **unconditionally retract** his personal 
> attack on Kexy Biscuit, the person who sent the revert patch in protest 
> (+Cc), and acknowledge that people who work with AOSC.io aren't 
> "state-sponsored paid actors";
> 3. This type of statement should be included somewhere public as soon as 
> practically possible should sanction compliance affect kernel 
> development again in the future;
> 4. No personal attacks should be allowed based on tinfoil-hat reasoning.

I agree those actions and IMHO this should be addressed under Linux's
Code of Conduct enforcement [1] framework.

I also look forward to a formal investigation report on the entire event.
It may eventually result in an overhaul of our governance model.

[1]: https://docs.kernel.org/process/code-of-conduct.html

Thanks
>
> Thanks,
> Peter.
[...]
-- 
- Jiaxun

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 04:56:50PM +0000, Hantong Chen wrote:
> 
> For People???s Republic of China, there are about 500 entities that
> are on the U.S. OFAC SDN / non-SDN lists, especially HUAWEI, which
> is one of the most active employers from versions 5.16 through 6.1,
> according to statistics. This is unacceptable, and we must take
> immediate action to address it, with the **same** reason.

There are multiple sanctions programs, and at least in the US, for the
sanctions program which Huawei is in, there is an exception for
conversations and patches that take place in a public mailing list,
such as LKML.  As a result, as the ext4 maintainer, I am comfortable
taking patches from engineers employed by Huawei, and I consider them
valued members of the ext4 development community.

However, note that China is *not* actively attacking Taiwai
militarily, while there are Russian missiles and drones, some of which
may controlled by embedded Linux systems, that are being used against
Ukraine even as we speak.  Hence, it should not be surprising that the
rules imposed by the US Government might be different for Huawei
compared to other sanctioned entities that are directly or indirectly
controlled by the Russian Military-Industrial complex.

There are also other sanctions regimes imposed by Japan, European
Countries, etc., which might be more or less strict.  So in general,
if you are not sure what you need to do as an US, European, Japanese,
etc. citizen who might be subject to civil or criminal penalties ----
talk to a lawyer.

The bottom line is that it is a false equivalence to claim that
sanctions involving China and Russia are the same.  They very much
aren't; one country is engaging in an active shooting war (or if you
prefer, "special military operation"), and the other is not.

Of course, if China were to militarily attack Taiwan or some other
country in Asia, circumstances might change at some point in the
future.  Hopefully Chinese leaders will pursue a path of wisdom and
those consequences won't come to pass.  Ultimately, though, that's not
up to any of us on this mail thread.

Cheers,

					- Ted

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Andy Shevchenko]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 07:18:44PM +0200, Dragan Milivojević wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 at 18:31, Peter Cai <peter@typeblog.net> wrote:

...

> He has exposed his lack of morals and inability of self reflection
> with the trolls comment.
> He has exposed his ignorance, coming from his state media
> brainwashing, with the media comment.
> He has exposed his ignorance, arrogance and blatant Russophobia with
> his "I'm Finish" comment, as if
> Finland has any high moral ground when it comes to WWII (for the
> historically ignorant: Finnish "concentration camps").

Yeah, with my hat of the person whose home town is under (Russian) attack for
the 10+ years (don't be surprised, please, the war lasts more than a decade
already) on I am fully understand Linus' arguments about history and being not
very friendly about Russians.

As you showed above seems like you also will benefit from digging to the
history a bit. The nice questions to be answered (but not limited to) are:
1) What had happened to Finland in 1939?
2) Has Finland territory been changed (occupied by another country) in time?
2a) (bonus Q) How many times and by which countries / empires?
3) (speaking of WW II) How many Jews were killed by Finland?

May be this helps changing a bit your understanding of Linus and other Finns.

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Hantong Chen]

> However, note that China is *not* actively attacking Taiwai
> militarily, while there are Russian missiles and drones, some of which
> may controlled by embedded Linux systems, that are being used against
> Ukraine even as we speak.  Hence, it should not be surprising that the
> rules imposed by the US Government might be different for Huawei
> compared to other sanctioned entities that are directly or indirectly
> controlled by the Russian Military-Industrial complex.

I wonder some of Ukrainian misiles and drones might also be using
the embedded Linux controllers, and why aren't there any sanctions.
This cannot be used as an excuse.

What LF and Linus done will inevitably create a climate of fear where
contributors and maintainers from the *Countries of Particular Concern*
feels endangered.

This is clearly NOT what contributors truly want. People from around the world
once firmly believed that Linux was a free and open-source project. However, 
Greg's commit and Linus' response deeply disappoint them.

Open-source projects might be international, but the people or organizations
controlling them are not. This is the source of concern and disappointment.

> Of course, if China were to militarily attack Taiwan or some other
> country in Asia, circumstances might change at some point in the
> future.  Hopefully Chinese leaders will pursue a path of wisdom and
> those consequences won't come to pass.  Ultimately, though, that's not
> up to any of us on this mail thread.

Finally, I must point out that Taiwan's status as part of China has never
changed and will never change. The term "military attack" is therefore
**inappropriate**. The move to solve the Taiwan question and achieve
China's reunification is coming soon and before that China must make full
preparation for the upcoming *sanctions* from the U.S. government, including
handling the issue of high dependence on any international open-source
projects.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Oleksiy Protas]

Dear Serge,

On behalf of a long time Linux user and developer I thank you for your hard work and contributions to the kernel.

> For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to

I think you should contact the lawyers of Baikal Electronics JSC which are listed as your work place in your GitHub profile and which is under sanctions due to it being directly involved in the ongoing war. Specifically the production of your company makes its way into rockets and drones which I see explode out of my window every night. Given your history contributing Baikal patches in 2023 you do not seemed to have a problem with this fact I suppose.

It's quite apalling that this needs to be broken down to adult people.

Take care and consider rethinking your life choices.

Oleksiy

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 06:19:16PM +0000, Hantong Chen wrote:
> 
> I wonder some of Ukrainian misiles and drones might also be using
> the embedded Linux controllers, and why aren't there any sanctions.
> This cannot be used as an excuse.

The question of whether there are any sanctions is up to governments
and legislatures of those countries that have enacted the relevant
laws and regulations.  This is not up to the Linux development
community.  But given that we are citizes of our respective countries,
we are obliged to follow the laws of our countries --- and if we
don't, we can be subject to enforcement actions of our countries'
governments.  For someone who is a Chinese citizen, the same would
apply to any rules and regulations promulgated by the Chinese
government, no?

The question of why a particular country has decided to sanction
Russia and not Ukraine, and why a country has decided to support one
country versus another, whether it's Germany, France, and Poland
sending tanks and armored vehicles to Ukraine, or North Korea sending
artillary shells to Russia, is not up to the Linux development
commuity.  As individuals we may have our own opinions of the
appropriatness one one versus another, but the fact remains that there
are sanctions imposed on one set of countries, but not the against the
other set.

Hypothetically, if someone was a Russian Citizen, and there was a
Russian Law forbidding them to provide technical assistance to US
entities, then that person would be obliged to respect that law, and
not send any patches to US-based open source projects.  Depending on
how that law was worded, a Russian-based open source project might not
be allowed to accept changes from US entities, and again, if you were
a Russian open source project maintainer, you would be obliged to
follow that law --- or maybe you would be thrown into a Russian jail.
Whether you are a Russian patriot and are 100% behind the Russian law,
or think that perhaps it's not the best policy, doesn't really matter;
you are still obliged to follow the law one way or another.

(Personally, my sympathies are entirely with Ukraine, but my opinions
really don't matter for the purposes of this discussion, because I
don't make my country's foreign policy.)

> What LF and Linus done will inevitably create a climate of fear where
> contributors and maintainers from the *Countries of Particular Concern*
> feels endangered.

In the ideal world, one country would't be invading another conutry,
and we wouldn't have these sanctions regimes.  But they were not
*caused* by the decisions of the LF and Linus.  The sanctions regimes
were enacted by multiple countries' legal governmnts, and now the
question is how can we best protect the Linux development comunity,
the operators of web and git servers that are redistributing Linux
kernel sources. etc.

The Linux community may be an international open source project.  But
it is composed of individuals who have to respect the rule of law of
their individual country; and many countries have spoken quite clearly
on this subject.

Cheers,

					- Ted

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Dragan Milivojević]

> Yeah, with my hat of the person whose home town is under (Russian) attack for
> the 10+ years (don't be surprised, please, the war lasts more than a decade
> already) on I am fully understand Linus' arguments about history and being not
> very friendly about Russians.

How about your hat off to the people in the Donbas,
~12K of them that had died from Ukrainian artillery fire,
that were under imminent threat of being overrun by
the Ukrainian forces in February 2022? Are you going
to scream about Russian propaganda when I link
the OSCE reports about a 10 fold increase in attacks
at that same time?

BTW can I be racist towards Germans and Croats since
their ancestors exterminated my kin in their death camps?

>
> As you showed above seems like you also will benefit from digging to the
> history a bit. The nice questions to be answered (but not limited to) are:
> 1) What had happened to Finland in 1939?
> 2) Has Finland territory been changed (occupied by another country) in time?
> 2a) (bonus Q) How many times and by which countries / empires?
> 3) (speaking of WW II) How many Jews were killed by Finland?

Maybe you should look up the Finnish concentration camps
 (they called them work camps), that had death percentages
similar to some of Nazi death camps, where Russians, Roma,
Serbs and plenty of other E.Europeans perished, including children?

The fact that they fought alongside Nazis and that they were allowed
to remain independent (and neutral) after the war is, I hope, common
knowledge.

How TF in this day and age is it considered acceptable to be openly
racist towards some people
because you hold historical grievances from 70 years ago?

And for those of you doubting my words, here is a test: Replace the
statements from various
prominent figures, including USA officials, about Russians and Russia
with Jews and Israel and post
them on your social media accounts. See how fast you will be denounced
as a racist.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky: Approved racism.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Dragan Milivojević]

> It's quite apalling that this needs to be broken down to adult people.
>
> Take care and consider rethinking your life choices.

Does the same apply for Raytheon, Boeing etc employees?

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Dragan Milivojević]

> Hypothetically, if someone was a Russian Citizen, and there was a
> Russian Law forbidding them to provide technical assistance to US
> entities, then that person would be obliged to respect that law, and
> not send any patches to US-based open source projects.  Depending on
> how that law was worded, a Russian-based open source project might not
> be allowed to accept changes from US entities, and again, if you were
> a Russian open source project maintainer, you would be obliged to
> follow that law --- or maybe you would be thrown into a Russian jail.
> Whether you are a Russian patriot and are 100% behind the Russian law,
> or think that perhaps it's not the best policy, doesn't really matter;
> you are still obliged to follow the law one way or another.

But they are not, neither is China and I only see blatant approved racism on
the western side.

> In the ideal world, one country would't be invading another conutry,
> and we wouldn't have these sanctions regimes.  But they were not
> *caused* by the decisions of the LF and Linus.  The sanctions regimes
> were enacted by multiple countries' legal governmnts, and now the
> question is how can we best protect the Linux development comunity,
> the operators of web and git servers that are redistributing Linux
> kernel sources. etc.

In an ideal world the USA would not be a hegemon that invades, bombs
and overthrows foreign governments, threatens the security of other nuclear
powers, expands its hostile alliance and sanctions half of the world.

Anyway you fail to understand that is not the topic. The rage comes
from LF actions
and Linus words. All they had to do was to say: Thank you people for
your contribution
but we have no other choice, this is the law.

But they did quite the opposite and Linus showed his true ugly
white western supremacy face for all to see.
That is the cause of the rage.
The real danger is the split in the open source community and the
"software Iron Curtain" erected by the USA.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Oleksiy Protas]

Brate Dragane,

I was not aware of the fact that either Raytheon or Boeing are directly supplying the Russian invasion. That would be a concerning development indeed.

If you possess any information of that being the case, I urge you to contact GUR anonymously at their official whistleblowing email: gur_official@proton.me

Thank you for your diligence, only together we can stop the war.

Kind regards,
Olekiy

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Khalil Fazal]

Hi Serge,

I'm really angry that it has come to this.
Fuck the fascists for bullying the Russians from the community.
I'm just a regular end user who has been using Linux for 17 years.
I was born in 1991, the same year the kernel was created.
This is so fucking disgusting.

Lots of love, in solidarity,

Khalil from Toronto, Canada

On 2024-10-24 00:27, Serge Semin wrote:
> 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. Specifically:
>
> NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel upstream
> work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very tough reviews
> with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back then. That
> experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since then I've got
> several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If not for you
> it wouldn't have been possible.
>
> Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my Linux kernel
> journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my DW I2C
> driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here and there -
> GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s. Quite heat
> discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the time we
> managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit the
> discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never refused to
> provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even though you
> didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to reviewers
> and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel knowledges and all
> the tips and tricks you shared.
>
> * Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my DW DMAC
> fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably working with the
> DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/
>
> Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy patchset in you
> suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It was a first
> time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the trust. I'll
> never forget that.
>
> Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver maintenance to
> me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less errors-prune,
> especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or working in the
> mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of DW
> SPI-controller users since then.
>
> Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform and DW AHCI
> SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path. But still
> all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the patches
> were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience I've got from
> the reviews.
>
> Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list during my
> MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was always a
> pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the field. Alas
> I've spent too much time working on the patches for another subsystems and
> failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my promise, but
> as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own deadline.
>
> Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of the DW
> PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review another patches
> for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to work with
> you.  Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver maintenance. I
> think we were doing a great work together.
>
> Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem and
> particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have turned to be a
> kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has stopped. I really
> hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and DW XPCS
> patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell might
> disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful after all,
> at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together with Russell
> on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to finish it up
> after all.
>
> Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most hardwary part
> of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have been laconic
> and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank you very
> much for that.
>
> Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the hwmon and
> watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.
>
> Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC patches even
> got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the time
> you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.
>
> * Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC patchsets
> anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the work it
> would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches convert the
> mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the generic DW
> uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on that
> controller.
>
> Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my patches sent
> for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was straight,
> highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.
> Thank you very much for that.
>
> Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to meet in the
> kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the time spent
> for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a pleasure to
> meet you here.
>
> I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to
> defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in
> these days. It means a lot.
>
> A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:
>
> Signed-off patches:		518
> Reviewed and Acked patches:	253
> Tested patches:			80
>
> You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing to some
> other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.
>
> I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation regarding the
> drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys IP-cores
> (about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time), feel free to
> reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the community
> members.
>
> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
> Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.
>
> Best Regards,
> -Serge(y)
>

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Andreas Herrmann]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 05:58:45PM +0100, Jiaxun Yang wrote:
> 
> 
> 在2024年10月24日十月 下午5:27，James Bottomley写道：
> > On Thu, 2024-10-24 at 16:59 +0100, Jiaxun Yang wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> >
> > It's Linux, so no official capacity at all.  However, I am expressing
> > the views of a number of people I talked to but it's not fair of me to
> > name them.
> 
> Fair enough, I was hoping that it's from Linux Foundation but it's still
> good news to me that it do represent some respectful individuals.
> 
> >
> [...]
> >> How should we handle it?
> >
> > A big chunk of the reason it's taken so long just to get the above is
> > that the Lawyers (of which I'm not one) are still discussing the
> > specifics and will produce a much longer policy document later, so they
> > don't want to be drawn into questions like this.  However, my non-
> > legal-advice rule of thumb that I'm applying until I hear otherwise is
> > not on the SDN list, not a problem.
> 
> Thank you for sharing your insights. I'm looking forward to the document.

+1

> While I remain quite upset about how things were handled, your message has
> helped restore some of my confidence in the community.

+1

> I agree with Peter Cai's earlier comment that steps should be taken to address
> the harm caused by the initial reckless actions, particularly to those who were
> humiliated.

+1

> It is also important to put measures in place to prevent such drama from recurring.
> A formal procedure for handling urgent compliance requests may be a sensible step
> forward.

+1

> I hold our community in high regard and would be heartbreaking to see the reputation
> of the Linux Kernel undermined in such an unfortunate manner. I would appreciate it
> if you could convey those thoughts to the relevant individuals.

+1

-- 
Regards,
Andreas

PS: What people also tend to forget. No matter how worse it gets in
world affairs there always will come a time after a conflict. And
people with brains should look forward to such times and how they can
continue to work together then.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Andy Shevchenko]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 09:46:58PM +0200, Dragan Milivojević wrote:
> > Yeah, with my hat of the person whose home town is under (Russian) attack for
> > the 10+ years (don't be surprised, please, the war lasts more than a decade
> > already) on I am fully understand Linus' arguments about history and being not
> > very friendly about Russians.
> 
> How about your hat off to the people in the Donbas,
> ~12K of them that had died from Ukrainian artillery fire,
> that were under imminent threat of being overrun by
> the Ukrainian forces in February 2022? Are you going
> to scream about Russian propaganda when I link
> the OSCE reports about a 10 fold increase in attacks
> at that same time?

Yeah, yeah, no point to discuss with you "Russian state-sponsored spam".
Btw, are you from Serbia?

> BTW can I be racist towards Germans and Croats since
> their ancestors exterminated my kin in their death camps?

You should answer your question yourself.

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Andy Shevchenko]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 06:01:02AM +0300, Oleksiy Protas wrote:
> Brate Dragane,
> 
> I was not aware of the fact that either Raytheon or Boeing are directly supplying the Russian invasion. That would be a concerning development indeed.
> 
> If you possess any information of that being the case, I urge you to contact GUR anonymously at their official whistleblowing email: gur_official@proton.me
> 
> Thank you for your diligence, only together we can stop the war.

Bravo!

P.S. "Don't feed the trolls".

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 03:35:37PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> 
> Okay, great. I'm fully on your side: let's sanction all countries that
> like to wage wars of aggressions against other countries and kick out
> all maintainers from there.

Sanctions are imposed by Governments --- for example, the US,
European, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, etc.  Not Linux developers, nor
Russian troll farms, nor Russia's useful idiots on the internet.  It's
not up to anyone on this mail thread.

I see from your country code in your signature that you apparently
live in Germany.  Please note that if you violate Germany's laws and
regulations, whether it's by supplying bomb-making technical
assistance to a terrorist group, or lending technical assistance to
sanctioned entities directly or indirectly controlled by the Russian
Military-Intelligence, you could be subject to civil or criminal
penalties.  And that's not up to me; it's up to your elected leaders
and Germany's judicial system.

If you don't like this, I cordially invite you to exercise your
democratic rights and make your opinions known to your fellow citizens
and to your elected politicians.

      	      		       	       - Ted

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Oleksiy Protas]

> P.S. "Don't feed the trolls"

Don't you worry. Our friend here tried to reply to this message, he did so twice in fact with slightly different wording, but it was full of political rage and tu quoque so I assume he fell victim to the spam filter thanks to you special counter-baiting operation so to speak.

That aside, I did a very superficial search and it seems that the original author had already had a pull being rejected on the grounds it was coming straight from his Baikal credentials. It's a real pity that an apparently very able engineer is just playing pretend despite knowing full well why is it so that LF migh not want to be associated with Baikal in any way.

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[Yanteng Si]

在 2024/10/24 12:27, Serge Semin 写道:
> Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to meet in the
> kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the time spent
> for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a pleasure to
> meet you here.
I am also deeply delighted to meet you here. In the process of 
collaborating with you,
I have gained a lot and am really full of gratitude.
>
> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a
> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.
Let's spend more of our spare time on enjoying life.

Thanks,
Yanteng
>
> Best Regards,
> -Serge(y)
>

Re: Kernel maintainer *CENSORED* on LKML [WAS: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer]

[metux]

On 29.10.24 20:33, Dragan Milivojević wrote:

Hi,

>>> First I've thought it's just when replying specific mails, but now
>>> turned out *all* my mails are blocked, even totally unrelated things.
>>> I can confirm it's not by the message content, but my mail address or
>>> domain. I'm blocked from whole kernel.org
>>
>> Same thing on my end, partial sample: https://imgur.com/a/l4Jcfhk
>
> And it is spreading, previous message to dng@lists.dyne.org was rejected with:
>
> "Message rejected by filter rule match"

Do you have some evidence that Devuan's mail server is really blocking
us ?

If so, I'd be exceptionally surprised.


--mtx

Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

[metux]

On 24.10.24 21:46, Dragan Milivojević wrote:

> How about your hat off to the people in the Donbas,
> ~12K of them that had died from Ukrainian artillery fire,
> that were under imminent threat of being overrun by
> the Ukrainian forces in February 2022? Are you going
> to scream about Russian propaganda when I link
> the OSCE reports about a 10 fold increase in attacks
> at that same time?

Let's also add the Serbia. The one that had been attacked by the North
Atlantic Terror Organisation under the pretext of allged "ethnical
cleansing". One day before NATO (including Germany, btw) started it's
war of aggression, the German military intelligence said: "there's
*STILL* *NO SIGN* of ethnical cleansing done by the Serbs".

Have been developers / maintainers coming from NATO countries been
banned from the kernel ? And have critics been hard-banned on the
Linux project's mail servers for just criticising the leadership ?
(that happened to me few days agao - let that sink in: a maintianer
being blocked from mailing to any Linux maillist nor individuals !)

The best thing we, the FOSS community, can do is STAY OUT of those
conflicts, no matter what. Otherwise FOSS becomes POSS - politware,
exactly what now happened to Linux.


--mtx

Re: Kernel maintainer *CENSORED* on LKML [WAS: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer]

[Goran]

Widely accepted spam lists are few and once on one it will get hard to
get cleared.

Maybe Devuan has no clue that your domain is on one or multiple spam
list. They are just using spam lists to block.

Spam lists can be used for such nasty things.

Am Mittwoch, dem 30.10.2024 um 14:48 +0100 schrieb metux:
> On 29.10.24 20:33, Dragan Milivojević wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > > > First I've thought it's just when replying specific mails, but
> > > > now
> > > > turned out *all* my mails are blocked, even totally unrelated
> > > > things.
> > > > I can confirm it's not by the message content, but my mail
> > > > address or
> > > > domain. I'm blocked from whole kernel.org
> > > 
> > > Same thing on my end, partial sample: https://imgur.com/a/l4Jcfhk
> > 
> > And it is spreading, previous message to dng@lists.dyne.org was
> > rejected with:
> > 
> > "Message rejected by filter rule match"
> 
> Do you have some evidence that Devuan's mail server is really
> blocking
> us ?
> 
> If so, I'd be exceptionally surprised.
> 
> 
> --mtx

Re: Maintainers now blocked from kernel.org mail access [WAS Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer]

[metux]

Resending with another address, since the other one is
hard-blocked / censored by kernel.org mail server.

On 30.10.24 15:33, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> On 24.10.24 20:19, Hantong Chen wrote:
>
>> What LF and Linus done will inevitably create a climate of fear where
>> contributors and maintainers from the *Countries of Particular Concern*
>> feels endangered.
>
> And it's getting worse:
>
> They're now blocking mail traffic on kernel.org, even from maintainers.
> (my whole company is hard-marked as "spam"). Anything @kernel.org -
> lists as well as invidual inboxes.
>
> Still in the process of compiling evidence report. Anybody out there
> who's affected too, let me know - will be added to the report.
>
> I wonder when this one will be blocked, too. (I've still got many more
> left).
>
>> This is clearly NOT what contributors truly want. People from around
>> the world
>> once firmly believed that Linux was a free and open-source project.
>> However,
>> Greg's commit and Linus' response deeply disappoint them.
>
> Indeed. The trust that had been bulit up in decades is now finally
> destroyed - just by a few mails.
>
> Linux has been turned into POSS, politware.
>
>> Open-source projects might be international, but the people or
>> organizations
>> controlling them are not. This is the source of concern and
>> disappointment.
>
> That's why those projects should never depend on just a few individuals
> or organisations in one specific country.
>
>
>
> --mtx
>

Re: Kernel maintainer *CENSORED* on LKML [WAS: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer]

[metux]

Reposing with a different address, since my domain is hard-blocked
by kernel.org mail server.


On 29.10.24 17:51, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> On 25.10.24 15:21, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
>
> Hello folks,
>
>
> <snip>
>
> Now they're really gone wild: I'm blocked by vger's spam filter.
>
> An official Linux maintainer is censored on LKML for critizing his
> holyness Torvalds.
>
> First I've thought it's just when replying specific mails, but now
> turned out *all* my mails are blocked, even totally unrelated things.
> I can confirm it's not by the message content, but my mail address or
> domain. I'm blocked from whole kernel.org
>
>
> Here's some piece of evidece (there's much more, I'm collecting it all)
>
>  >    linux-renesas-soc@vger.kernel.org:
>  >        SMTP error from remote server for TEXT command, host:
> smtp.subspace.kernel.org (44.238.234.78) reason: 550 5.7.1 Your message
>  > looked spammy to us. Please check https://subspace.
>  > kernel.org/etiquette.html and resend.
>  >
>  >
>  >    netdev@vger.kernel.org:
>  >        SMTP error from remote server for TEXT command, host:
> smtp.subspace.kernel.org (44.238.234.78) reason: 550 5.7.1 Your message
>  > looked spammy to us. Please check https://subspace.
>  > kernel.org/etiquette.html and resend.
>  >
>  >
>  >    linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org:
>  >        SMTP error from remote server for TEXT command, host:
> smtp.subspace.kernel.org (44.238.234.78) reason: 550 5.7.1 Your message
>  > looked spammy to us. Please check https://subspace.
>  > kernel.org/etiquette.html and resend.
>
>
> This is unprecented, yet another dam broken. After silently removing
> valuable maintainers from the MAINTAINERS file, now they wen't another
> step further and actively blocking communication.
>
> Seems that critizing his holyness is even worse than being Russian here.
> This behaviour is just triggering even more criticism.
>
>
> Everybody's who's unhappy with this, feel free to bringt that on the
> table @lkml. Let the Streisand effect kick in.
>
>
>
>
> --mtx
>
>
>

Re: Kernel maintainer *CENSORED* on LKML [WAS: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer]

[metux]

On 30.10.24 14:57, Dragan Milivojević wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 at 14:48, metux <metux@gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> Do you have some evidence that Devuan's mail server is really blocking
>> us ?
>>
>> If so, I'd be exceptionally surprised.
>
> Well it's blocking me that's for sure. Reject message attached.

Are you subscribed to this list ?

I recall something like it's subscribers-only (once fell into the trap
and tried to post w/ wrong address).


--mtx