Removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics

"Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided."

That two-line comment, submitted by major Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, accompanied a patch that removed about a dozen names from the kernle's MAINTAINERS file. "Some entries" notably had either Russian names or .ru email addresses. "Various compliance requirements" was, in this case, sanctions against Russia and Russian companies, stemming from that country's invasion of Ukraine.

This merge did not go unnoticed. Replies on the kernel mailing list asked about this "very vague" patch. Kernel developer James Bottomley wrote that "we" (seemingly speaking for Linux maintainers) had "actual advice" from Linux Foundation counsel. Employees of companies on the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (OFAC SDN), or connected to them, will have their collaborations "subject to restrictions," and "cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file." "Sufficient documentation" would mean evidence that someone does not work for an OFAC SDN entity, Bottomley wrote.

There followed a number of messages questioning the legitimacy, suddenness, potentially US-forced, and non-reviewed nature of the commit, along with broader questions about the separation of open source code from international politics. Linux creator Linus Torvalds entered the thread with, "Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about." He wrote: "It's entirely clear why the change was done" and noted that "Russian troll factories" will not revert it and that "the 'various compliance requirements' are not just a US thing.

Names removed, code remains

The majority of those dropped from the maintainers file work on drivers for hardware from Acer, Cirrus, and, notably, Baikal, a fabless chipmaker that tried to develop Russian-designed ARM CPUs and declared bankruptcy in 2023. One of the removed Russian developers, Serge Semin, whose GitHub profile indicates having worked for the sanctioned Russian tech firm Baikal, wrote an extensive goodbye note to the kernel list, describing himself as a "volunteer and hobbyist."

Sanctions against Russia and its businesses have come up against Linux kernel maintenance before. Last year, as reported by the Phronix blog, networking patches submitted by developers associated with Baikal were refused by one subsystem maintainer, but other Baikal-sourced patches were accepted upstream elsewhere in the kernel. US sanctions on Russian tech firms have had a drastic effect on the Russian economy overall.

For now, prior contributions from those Russian coders removed from the maintainers list remain in the kernel. Ars reached out to the Linux Foundation for comment and will update this post with its response.

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