Recently, the development of the Linux kernel has been generating controversy that goes beyond the technical panorama. Linus Torvalds, the creator and head of this project, announced something unique.

As noted on Phoronix, Torvalds’ right-hand man Greg Kroah-Hartman briefly announced that they had decided to eliminate a certain number of people in charge of the core (the so-called “maintainers”).

It soon became clear what these developers had in common. They were all Russian or had a connection to Russia, most of which used an email address with a .ru TLD.

This move sparked criticism from the Linux community, but Torvalds immediately posted a message to the Linux kernel mailing list, making it clear that these complaints were likely coming from “Russian trolls.”

“It is completely clear why the change was made and there will be no going back,” Torvalds explained. He also emphasized that: Sanctions against Russia due to Ukraine War This was the reason for making this decision, something that wasn’t entirely clear at the beginning.

This decision was responded to by the Ministry of Digital Development in Russia, whose officials announced plans to create their own Linux community.

Details about this project are almost nil, but the initiative appears to follow the steps the country has taken with RISC-V architecture. In the latter case, a path is opened for the development of its own chips, far from possible trade wars, and the same will happen in the case of software if Russia finally goes its own way with its own line of development of the Linux kernel.

In both cases Saying it is one thing, doing it is another.. While the Russian developer community is large and high-quality, creating and maintaining a fork of the Linux kernel is a daunting task.

The massive size of this project means that the brunt of development falls not on independent developers, but on developers working at large technology companies such as Huawei, Intel, Red Hat, Google or AMD.

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in Xataka | There are programmers who use tabs and there are programmers who use spaces. And then there’s Linus Torvalds