Here's my _personal_ view on the Baikal Elektroniks situation. This is not any kind of official statement by LF.

First of all, everyone must understand that Baikal Elektroniks is a company that produces equipment for pretty much a single client -- the Russian state. You can nominally buy a computer with a BE chip as a private citizen, but in reality you'd never do so because a) it's almost impossible to get, b) you'd buy a much slower chip and pay 4-5 times more than you would for any other chip available on the market. So, it's accurate to say that BE produces equipment pretty much exclusively for the Russian military and its state run businesses (who are mandated to buy BE equipment by law).

Second of all, and most importantly -- getting your patches accepted into mainline means receiving a lot of very expensive labour and computing resources gratis: you not only get free code reviews from maintainers, but you also benefit from a bunch of behind-the-scenes CI infrastructure that runs checks on your code -- both at the patch stage, and later as part of regular integration/CI/fuzzing runs. Any treewide changes, such as security improvements by efforts like KSPP, will also be automatically applied to any in-kernel drivers and architectures.

So, in reality, accepting code for any hardware into the Linux kernel means helping to test, maintain, and debug that code for years to come. The resources for that are pooled from many device manufacturers with the understanding that these efforts will be part of the tide that "lifts all boats," including their own. However, in the case of Baikal Elektroniks the situation becomes tricky. Yes, Linux is free software (free as in libre), but maintainers and CI infrastructure require funding. BE is placed under strict sanctions in many countries due to its direct affiliation with the Russian military, so companies funding CI and maintainer efforts have to consider if their money is directly benefiting a sanctioned company (and, indirectly, the Russian military).

So, it may be true that the rising tide lifts all boats, but if that boat is a Russian military warship, you have to decide what kind of message you send them.

@monsieuricon @LWN QOTW right there at the bottom!

@monsieuricon

BE is placed under strict sanctions in many countries due to its direct affiliation with the Russian military

Weird how Western electronics manufacturers and chip fabricators get free passes from sanctions or trade controls despite their widespread utilization in state and military applications. Totally coincidental and random that it’s just industries within Western geopolitical competitors that get repressed. I’m sure there’s definitely not some silent economic war being waged against industries within this technology sphere or something.

@lkundrak @monsieuricon The problem with this sort of topic, of course, is that it turns the LWN comment area into a raging port-a-potty fire. It may be unavoidable, though...

@LWN @lkundrak @monsieuricon Turn it to a drinking game, drink every time a comment starts with "what about... "

@monsieuricon In the spirit of open source, I see no reason of drafting a new message for the Russian warship when one has been so efficiently authored already.

@monsieuricon Thought experiment time. If the exact same patchset would have been sent by a company with a different name registered in a different country - would it have been okay to accept it?

@monsieuricon

So, it may be true that the rising tide lifts all boats, but if that boat is a Russian military warship, you have to decide what kind of message you send them.

@monsieuricon we’ve had years of instilling spdx identifiers for that particular purpose (provide to downstream entities the actual owner of the copyright) and only now we find out that it’s failed and we’re back to ad-hoc decisions (based on a single maintainer’s racist views)

@monsieuricon Just say "We're pussies and we're afraid that the US government will thump us". It would save you the empty words and us the time of reading them.