Harald Velta ( harald welte ), a well -known Linux core developer, laureate of a significant contribution to the development of free software, founder organizations GPL-violations.org and one of the creators of Netfilter/iptables, published his opinion on the remarks Participants from the list of mayor Linux nucleus on the basis of their alleged work in suction companies. According to Harald, he was proud of the involvement of the core developers in the work of the community, but the current community does not look like the one he remembers, and it hurts him to see what is happening there. In his opinion, there is nothing worse than discrimination of people only because of their passport, place of residence or place of work.
as a resident of Germany, he compares such a discrimination with the law operating in the black times by the law of related responsibility that allowed the person to bring a person accountable for crimes committed by a member of his family. Of course, the exclusion from the process of developing the nucleus cannot be compared with imprisonment, but the principle is similar – the punishment follows not for specific acts, but only for communication with those who committed condemned acts.
In addition to discrimination of developers based on their name, email or employer, surprise caused that removal was made without any explanation. Subsequent clarifications made it clear that the case is in sanctions, and the removal was carried out on the basis of consultation with lawyers, but there were no full legal analysis and were not noted the subjects involved for the implementation of sanctions? Developers from the USA? Creators of distributions?) .
Velta believed that when developing the nucleus, the joint work of individual developers is important, regardless of who their employers are, and the contribution to the development is evaluated by merits, and not by the personality of the participant and not on the basis of work in some company. Removing from the list of accompanying, according to Velte, could be understood if specific developers were added to the sanctions list, but in the case under consideration, people who could be allegedly related to suction companies were removed.
But even in the case of providing convincing legal arguments, the actual exclusion of the mayor, it would be right to conduct a public discussion, try to find a way to circumvent the requirements of lawyers and organize a social movement against. In an extreme case, if the bypass tracks were not found, according to Velte, one could expect civilian disobedience or leaving the explanations in the Maintainers file that removal became a forced measure. Instead, the most significant developers without unnecessary publicity in the composition of fixes of symbolic drivers hammered a patch with blurry the wording and thereby showed disrespect for the work of remote participants and showed other developers as in the community people treat each other.