Legally, it doesn’t seem like he had much choice. The war has been going on for 2+ years now? I’m just surprised it took so long.
Regardless, this is probably going to have an impact on existing maintainers as it most likely isn’t clear who will act as replacements. I’ll bring it up again: 2% of the Linux Foundation’s money simply isn’t good enough for the Linux Kernel. It should be way way way more.
The discussion around this has been physically painful to read. From what I gather, the delisted maintainers are people on sanction lists, i.e. somehow connected to the Russian state, and they have been given the opportunity to prove their innocence by providing some (admittedly unspecified) documents to Linus and the Linux Foundation.
Judging by Linus’s updated comment in that article there are legal concerns involved, as the Linux Foundation is a US-based organization. Though even if they weren’t, it is the morally correct thing to do to give Russian state actors the boot.
No, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to go into the details that I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.
I’m also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them.