Honestly, no matter how weird and filled with lies this project is, we technically do need a fork of the kernel after the recent Linus's racist political decision.
He removed all Russian contributors, called them Russia supporters and said that his decision is good basically. Ik most people will still trust Linus because of everything good he did but for me it was an obvious red flag.
Maintainers (not contributers or their contributions) associated with sanctioned russian companies were removed. The Linux foundation is a legal entity that has to comply with international sanctions.
The kernel and its changes are open source, you can just look at the changes that were made.
So the Russian maintainers couldn't insert something malicious into it. But yea looking at the source changes directly is better than trusting some biased articles.
Your words, not mine. If they were afraid of malicious code coming from these sources they would've removed them earlier and not only after their legal department recommend these maintainers be removed.
Open source doesn't mean that malicious code isn't impossible though. For a project as large as the Linux kernel it is unlikely, but see the xz-utils incident earlier this year for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
Yes I expected that argument. My point was there was no valid reason to remove them. The xz case didn't convince any other projects to get rid of maintainers based on their nationality after all.
It's obviously my own opinion that what Linus did was an nonnegotiable red flag but I'd prefer to stick with it for now. I guess making this discussion political was a pretty harmful decision so I'll remove some of my replies in order to avoid creating more drama.
Honestly if they don't get paid for contributing/maintaining, they actually make Russia lose money instead of earning it because they could maintain something in a Russian company instead. It's all a matter of perspective. Also Linus's explanation had hate speech vibes which cannot be justified and is obviously a racist act.