Russian Linux Kernel Developers Lose Maintainer Status Due to Compliance Requirements

In a recent announcement, Greg Kroah-Hartman of Linux Foundation mentioned about removing few Linux Kernel maintainers who are Russians or associated with Russia due to Compliance Requirements. In the email to the mailing list, Greg mentioned about [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. He didn't mention in detail about the Compliance requirements.

There are close to 20+ people who are among the best developers and contributed a lot to kernel development. They contributed to various modules like UFS FILE SYSTEM, RENESAS SUPERH ETHERNET DRIVER, PPTP DRIVER, MEMSENSING MICROSYSTEMS MSA311 DRIVER, MEDIA DRIVERS FOR HELENE, GRE DEMULTIPLEXER DRIVER, ARM/CIRRUS LOGIC CLPS711X ARM ARCHITECTURE, ACER ASPIRE 1 EMBEDDED CONTROLLER DRIVER. 

The maintainers whose emails ended with .ru are removed. US sanctioned Russia long time back and now, there is no reason for this decision to remove developers from open source project. It seems lawyers have advised Linus Torvalds and Linux Foundation to take this extreme step. 

The strange thing is, the maintainers modules or patches are not removed, only the maintainers names are removed and they don't have future access to the kernel. This is really insane, Linux Foundation using their work but kicking out from the Kernel development is not acceptable. 

The idea of Open Source is freedom and open source projects should work for the betterment of the society. They should not be controlled by any Government agencies.