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Removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics
A two-line comment about “various compliance requirements” spurred questions about sanctions policy and procedure on the Linux kernel mailing list.
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." Torvalds later wrote that he would not go into the details that kernel maintainers "were told by lawyers," and would not "start discussing legal issues with random internet people," which he suspected "are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them." 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.
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