Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel’s MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the [email protected] mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention.
The explanation for the removal is simply ““various compliance requirements””. Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries.
An early comment likely pins down the prevailing institutional pressures leading to this decision
What’s the deal with an international project adhering to what is obviously a decision of the US government?
Hint: The Linux Foundation (which notably employs Greg KH and Torvalds, and provides a lot of the legal and other infrastructure for this “international project”) is based in the US, and therefore has to follow US laws.
This is pretty fucked up. Like, we might see the kernel forked in the coming months/years.
See also: Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
Before I heard this yesterday, the same day I was thinking I would like to make my own operating system that was kernel-agnostic, (Free/Open/etc.)BSD and Linux (and maybe Hurd) as supported kernels, combined Gentoo and Guix’s features, removed Python has a hard dependency (which includes glibc, for example, as it needs Python to compile), and prioritized being built with only fast languages, probably with a focus on Zig, Rust, C, and Racket/Chez Scheme, enabling a very minimal distro. It would eventually allow packages like Python to be supported, but the idea was to make a distro that could be stripped down further than even Gentoo and have a package manager built in a fast language. I would probably need to support musl (which on Gentoo has a crypt use flag for libxcrypt, which depends on Python, though I believe it’s for running tests), µClibc, Cosmopolitan Libc, or work on my own fork of some libc instead of glibc.
With this news, this hobby project that I hoped to make a living from donations seems important now in regards to supporting BSD.