Wow, they decided to stop crediting some productive contributors, just because of how their email addresses end, but they kept all their contributions? This seems like the worst possible slap in the face.
If you don't like a nation and you want to sanction her people, then excise all their code and contributions from your codebase. Don't simply erase their acknowledgements and appropriate their code. That's got to be violating your own licensing terms.
Do these folks have recourse to file suit somewhere?
> Don't simply erase their acknowledgements and appropriate their code.
To be fair - anyone contributing to the GPL ought to be aware of the terms of their license. They're not "appropriating" something that was consciously and deliberately licensed by the contributors for these exact terms of ownership.
These people probably did nothing wrong, but sanctions are sanctions and they apply unilaterally. Their best path of recourse is to fork Linux (which is entirely legal) and continue their work on a downstream basis with patches that can be merged into the main branch.
I agree, and also to add another point, this actually provides some protection to those authors.
If you are a maintainer with credentials that allow you to push code into the kernel/driver then you are at risk for coercion and can be leveraged by hostile entities.
If those credentials has to go through a secondary or tertiary review process (due to the increased risk), its less likely given the limited benefit that leveraging these authors might be useful. The same would obviously be true for China as well.
China next? And then they cry that Linux does not have enough maintainers...
Wow, they decided to stop crediting some productive contributors, just because of how their email addresses end, but they kept all their contributions? This seems like the worst possible slap in the face.
If you don't like a nation and you want to sanction her people, then excise all their code and contributions from your codebase. Don't simply erase their acknowledgements and appropriate their code. That's got to be violating your own licensing terms.
Do these folks have recourse to file suit somewhere?
Isn't this the "who's currently in charge of maintaining the code" file and not the "who originally wrote this code" file?
> Don't simply erase their acknowledgements and appropriate their code.
To be fair - anyone contributing to the GPL ought to be aware of the terms of their license. They're not "appropriating" something that was consciously and deliberately licensed by the contributors for these exact terms of ownership.
These people probably did nothing wrong, but sanctions are sanctions and they apply unilaterally. Their best path of recourse is to fork Linux (which is entirely legal) and continue their work on a downstream basis with patches that can be merged into the main branch.
This has nothing to do with sanctions. Huawei is under same level of sanctions, but maintainers with `xxx@huawei.com` are not removed.
Linux Foundation silently run some "No Russians" campaign. That's not a problem by itself, but they should make a public statement about this.
> To be fair - anyone contributing to the GPL...
I agree, and also to add another point, this actually provides some protection to those authors.
If you are a maintainer with credentials that allow you to push code into the kernel/driver then you are at risk for coercion and can be leveraged by hostile entities.
If those credentials has to go through a secondary or tertiary review process (due to the increased risk), its less likely given the limited benefit that leveraging these authors might be useful. The same would obviously be true for China as well.