Hello Linux-kernel community,
I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg' commit
6e90b675cf942e ("MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance
requirements."). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of the
Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel maintainers,
including me.
The community members rightly noted that the _quite_ short commit log contained
very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how hard I
tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior maintainer I was
discussing the matter with haven't given an explanation to what compliance
requirements that was. I won't cite the exact emails text since it was a private
messaging, but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can do", "talk
to your (company) lawyer"... I can't say for all the guys affected by the
change, but my work for the community has been purely _volunteer_ for more than
a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that
reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the
patch has been merged in I don't really want to now. Silently, behind everyone's
back, _bypassing_ the standard patch-review process, with no affected
developers/subsystem notified - it's indeed the worse way to do what has been
done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the
devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but
haven't we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..
I can't believe the kernel senior maintainers didn't consider that the patch
wouldn't go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with
unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle
or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the
problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what's
done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been
fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political
ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built
on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might
be sanctioned...), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the
Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like
me.
Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some
reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has
simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though).
But before saying goodbye I'd like to express my gratitude to all the community
members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.
