Comment by supermatt
9 days ago
Active kernel contributors are spread all around the world, with a pretty even distribution across USA, Western Europe and Asia.
Your suggestion that the US government would lean on the citizenship of Torvalds in order to exert control over the kernel should be laughable but I concede that anything is possible these days.
Yeah, Nah, 0 chance.
Linus Torvalds, imo, is the reason we have open source, through Linux & Git. He’s the open source philosopher king.
I think he’s put enough in to know where his allegiance lies, over a 2010 US citizenship - a very different world.
There is also 0 chance, US/MS government hasn’t put a lot of pressure on him over the last 34 years of creating and spreading, at least the OS form of socialism
It is not laughable, Linux directly complies with SDN list[1] and US sanction policy(i.e. removing of russian developers by Linus). Thus, US does have and execute control over Linux kernel currently.
[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/navigating-global-regul...
I think you have some confusion about the role of the Linux Foundation in relation to the kernel. They provide financial, organisational, and infrastructural support and neither own nor control its development.
Linus is the BDFL and lead maintainer and if he wanted to move the kernel development anywhere else he could do so, but Linus Torvalds has stated that he personally agrees with them.
That is not the US controlling him, it is his own decision. Moreover he has dual citizenship and could renounce his US citizenship if he chose. When Greg takes over maintainership things may be different.
Why should Linus renounce US citizenship, not finnish? He is living with family in Oregon for 20+ years.
This is my main point here - not much things connecting Linus and Linux to EU. In question of US and EU tensions I am not really sure US citizen BDFL will party with EU, also because companies who spend money and contribute to kernel are located in US mainly.
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