[tpkee]

I supposed it was clear that I was referring to FOSS, in hindsight it wasn’t clear at all.

> Russian shenanigans

I do care about the conflict and hope for a swift victory by Ukraine, but in this instance it could have been anyone really. It doesn’t matter these people are Russians: Linus, to comply with “legal requirements”, threw out maintainers without giving an actual reason. If he is so eager to comply with legal requirements now, I wonder what he — he or any other software maintainer — would do were the “legal requirements” be for an unjust cause; countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects.

And on the matter of “we are the good guys, nothing can go wrong”: In EU politicians tried to make cryptography useless again, and while I don’t believe the law will pass I can’t help but wonder if FOSS maintainers, just like Linus, will happily comply.

[lifthrasiir]

My answer doesn't change for F/OSS, which has been widely mistaken to subsume open governance. Their underlying motivation does differ: the free software movement is concerned about user's freedom with respect to softwares and viral licenses were just means to that freedom, while the open source software movement cares more about the collaboration in the development phase but doesn't dictate the exact nature of collaboration, which the term "open governance" seeks to clarify.

While my point might be already a lost cause (sigh), I believe this distinction is very important because we don't know how to do open governance in general. We have a relatively strong case for F/OSS licensing mainly because it was easy to follow and therefore spreaded like fire. But every sizable project trying open governance is different from each other. In this regard:

> countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects.

This statement is irrelevant because it was the maintainers' decision to decide "who can and cannot work" for the Linux kernel. It's just your ideal---and honestly speaking, also my ideal---, and most real world F/OSS projects suffer from at least one issue against that ideal. We can't talk about how to achieve or move closer to the ideal without the correct understanding of terminology and situation, which your comment did (and still) miss. For example, the correct starting point would be this: why did many large projects have to create legal entities in some jurisdiction?