On Linux MAINTAINERS file removal of Russian developers

Should U.S. developers have been sanctioned over the Iraq war that was launched under false pretenses (non-existent WMD)?

Should company sanctions apply to individuals who happen to work for such a company?

Should the matter have been handled more gracefully than a stealthy removal from the MAINTAINERS file?

Has the culture of the Linux Kernel changed?

The culture has certainly changed, almost all big OSS projects have been captured and are essentially governed by corporations.

Perhaps Torvalds has been legally pressured, but 20 years ago he would have put up a fight at least. Back then everyone was proud that OSS could be used by anyone for anything. Now he attacks critics with the Russian troll meme. This is the worst of Torvalds I have seen so far.

So far, he does not seem to have any issues with exporting the Linux Kernel to Russia, which should also be prohibited by sanctions.

There's no export controls of non-commercial, non-ITAR software; such a thing would quickly run into a First Amendment wall. As PGP's Phil Zimmermann observed thirty years ago, you can always just print out your source code on paper and bind it as a book. Can the US government outlaw a book? Of course not.

- "In 1995, Zimmermann published the book PGP Source Code and Internals as a way to bypass limitations on exporting digital code. Zimmermann's introduction says the book contains "all of the C source code to a software package called PGP" and that the unusual publication in book form of the complete source code for a computer program was a direct response to the U.S. government's criminal investigation of Zimmermann for violations of U.S. export restrictions as a result of the international spread of PGP's use.[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...

You should really provide more grounds for stating that.

To what extent can most people actually move the needle of their government's actions?

As a thought experiment, consider a world where all Americans are banned from contributing to software projects because of the long and dismal history of US foreign policy - which involves murdering people so far from US borders as to make such murder fundamentally questionable at a national security level. While Americans protested the Vietnam and Iraq wars, these wars took place regardless. So how do you establish collective responsibility?

Does the fact that the protests took place make Americans immune from consequences? Or should it only matter if citizen movements can stop a government? In either case, you would find most of the G-20 responsible for some atrocity or the other.

The tragedy of the Russia situation is that it is a wholly unjust war, which should be penalised, but the logic and apparatus that would penalise it would also penalise most major nations. It is beyond the scope of HN to create a world order that would repair things. But just because the UNSC is broken, need not mean that the open source ecosystem be left to rot as well.