How is this keeping to open source philosophies in any way?
“No, you can’t work on this, you’re Russian.”
I don’t support the Russian Government or its actions in any way, but these devs are probably not part of it. They maintain drivers for fucking ASUS hardware.
This has nothing to do with open source. If Russians want to work on the Linux kernel, they're absolutely free to do so, because the source code is free and open source. What they are being restricted from is getting their changes submitted to the normal Linux foundation trees. FOSS doesn't mean you're entitled to have the maintainer of a project look at your patches, it means you can use the software however you want.
And yeah, it makes me sad that Russian kernel maintainers are being excluded. That doesn't mean it's a violation of open source philosophies (a maintainer can exclude anyone they want for any reason), it just means it's an unfortunate policy due to international sanctions.
I actually just emailed RMS about this and I'm genuinely curious what he says. If anyone else is interested, I'll ask if he's fine with me sharing some of the response.
Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.
So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.
That's the start, of course. One could always play good cop, bad cop: "I have to do this to comply with the law, sorry, there's nothing else I can do." What Linus has done here is play bad cop, bad cop: "the law says I have to obey sanctions, and by the way I support the sanctions and this move anyway."
his software, his rules... if he does not trust them (for any reason), he can just kick them... FOSS is not like an employment relationship where he cannot fire them without cause