Getting called "Paid Actor" by Linus Torvalds
October 23, 2024•1,922 words
Update: I am not participating in this whole shitshow anymore. I don't retract any of my comments made, but I also probably don't want your attention. If you want to get anything out of me, you can go away.
To those "don't get political" crowd: I urge you to read again what I said towards Torvalds. Have I ever agreed with some of the obvious troll bots? If telling Linus Torvalds "you shouldn't be making baseless accusations" is somehow a "political" opinion, I don't know what isn't. I sincerely wish you the best going forward, but I am going to try not to be even remotely involved in a community where their leaders can get away with abusing their community members in any manner.
My final involvement in this whole topic is demanding an apology letter towards all those that were accused of being paid actors. Whatever (or not) this ends up getting, I am not responding to the thread any further.
Context
On Oct 22 (or Oct 23 depending on where you are), Greg K-H posted a commit to remove a bunch of kernel maintainers citing "various compliance requirements". The commit was posted right before it was included in a pull request, without time for comments from pretty much anyone else. This has triggered some concerns on transparency in the Linux kernel community -- rather than referring to exact compliance requirements or state that they are under some type of NDA, Greg (and Linus Torvalds) have chosen to use the very vague wording to justify a big change.
Some have (IMHO, rightfully) raised a concern that this type of changes should at least have a better citation on why. They may be required legally to do so, or they are under some NDA, but referring to the existence of said law or NDA itself seems to be the minimum for transparency. Without citation, this sets a very dangerous precedent that Linus, or Greg, or anyone who threatens them with lawsuit, can influence the Linux kernel in unpredictable ways that no one else will be able to have an early eye on.
One of my friends sent a reverse patch for this to the list citing these concerns. This triggered responses from another bunch of people, some of which may rightfully be spam bots. However, instead of addressing the concern publicly, Greg chose to send a private correspondence to one of them seeking to defuse the situation (I assume), which didn't help. On the other hand, Linus Torvalds begun to call out people who raised concerns as Russian state-sponsored spam, and said that reverting this patch is equal to "supporting Russian aggression".
The last email mentioned above was the last straw for me due to the sheer ignorance and arrogance it showed. I wrote an email back trying to point out how absurd his response was, and ended up getting called paid actor.
Shortly after that, the whole https://lore.kernel.org began to 404. It ended up recovering, but I thought this showed that they might want to remove the conversation from public view at any time. So here is a copy of my arguably short email conversation with Linus Torvalds, in case that happens and Linux Foundation decides to stop even pretending they value community participation.
1. Linus calling out "Russian state-sponsored spam"
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:45:47 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEgRMQMxZZ0z-jY4uHT+Gg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <124c1b03-24c9-4f19-99a9-6eb2241406c2@mailbox.org>
Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting
reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to
"grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change
anything.
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm
accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US
thing.
If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read
the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian
state-sponsored spam.
As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call
brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian
aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of
history knowledge too.
Linus
2. My response
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:15:17 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <e25fb178-39fa-4b75-bdc8-a2ec5a7a1bf6@typeblog.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEgRMQMxZZ0z-jY4uHT+Gg@mail.gmail.com>
Hi there,
Not a maintainer, but I have made several bug reports using this email
address. At least 1 reasonably-sized patch is also currently under
review in the networking mailing list, along with people from several
American corporations, so hopefully you won't automatically assume this
email came from a "Russian troll" account.
Ok. With that out of the way, if you still want to bother reading,
here's why, in the most un-provocative tone possible, why your comments
_completely_ miss the point why people are upset:
On 10/23/24 1:45 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about. >
> It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting
> reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to
> "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change
> anything.
Yes. Everybody who has more than 1 brain cell knows, in general, "why".
The point was never to ask for the obvious response.
People are upset because no reference to _exactly which compliance
requirement_ resulted in the removal of these maintainers. No
open-source project can live outside of a political entity, but that is
not the reason why "obviously" can be used to write off such a change.
Even just stating "we were contacted by <...> but details are under NDA"
is a **much** better response than "due to various compliance
requirements". No one is saying the LF or the Linux kernel should be
outside of politics. That's impossible. But it _is_ possible to run the
project based on _transparency_ and _honesty_ instead of "why can't you
see the obvious".
> And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm
> accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US
> thing.
Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
these countries?
> If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read
> the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian
> state-sponsored spam.
Before calling out community members who raised legit concerns about
procedural transparency, maybe it is worth doing a quick fact-check.
There are a lot of suspicious looking `.ru` emails in this thread, but
they are not who first raised the concern. The revert patch was sent out
by someone at aosc.io. Look up who they actually are -- and before you
assume "state-sponsored spam" just because of the language of the
website, maybe you can also spend more than 1 second to check where the
website is even actually located.
> As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call
> brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian
> aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of
> history knowledge too.
I hope that either this comment wasn't written by the real Linus
Torvalds, or that Linus was not under his best judgement when this email
was sent. Because just like anyone who reads the news would know about
Russian aggression, anyone who knows anything about politics should also
be able to understand that individuals and their states are different
concepts.
If these maintainers are associated with the Russian state, this should
be cited as the reason for their removal. And you know what? Most people
wouldn't have any problem with it. And then you can say "we are not
supporting Russian aggression" with confidence. But this is **not** what
was done.
I seriously hope that Linus Torvalds would have known better.
Thanks,
Peter.
3. Linus calling me "paid actor"
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 12:19:37 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wjw0i-95S_3Wgk+rGu0TUs8r1jVyBv0L8qfsz+TJR8XTQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <e25fb178-39fa-4b75-bdc8-a2ec5a7a1bf6@typeblog.net>
On Wed, 23 Oct 2024 at 12:15, Peter Cai <peter@typeblog.net> wrote:
>
> Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
> these countries?
No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that
I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.
I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random
internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have
been riled up by them.
Linus
4. My last response
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:28:35 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <80c25e27-0d90-428d-b206-6252d411daaa@typeblog.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHk-=wjw0i-95S_3Wgk+rGu0TUs8r1jVyBv0L8qfsz+TJR8XTQ@mail.gmail.com>
> I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random
> internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have
> been riled up by them.
>
> Linus
This has never been a legal discussion, but a procedural transparency
discussion. You could simply say "our lawyer didn't ok this", and that's
perfectly fine. No one is going to argue against that.
Your action up until now is also exactly what a hypothetical paid actor
would have wanted to see happening -- it's not helping **understanding**
but rather only extending argument on what would have been a quick response.
Calling everyone "paid actors" don't help. If you have more than 1
minute to waste, I am under my most regularly-used internet handle to
respond to you. So has the person who sent the original "revert" patch.
Running a quick grep on the other mailing lists and their commits may
also have helped answer that.
Thanks,
Peter.
Conclusion?
I'm not sure this whole conversation needs anything added on top. My opinion has been made clear, so do all of the rest of community members, but I guess it is hard to talk to someone who refuses to listen.
I am not an active Linux kernel contributor, but I have had various bug reports and patches posted to the list. There is also a bigger-sized one with my initial contribution in it (not with my name in the author list, though). But being called a "paid actor" just for pointing out how absurd Linus's response was will certainly make me MUCH less willing to work on the Linux kernel in the future. Thanks, Linus.
And, if you still couldn't get it by this point: This whole conversation was never about "we should have random Russians as maintainers". It is about how an open-source community should be run. No one lives outside of political influence, everyone has political opinions, and that's fine. What is not fine is making decisions without even citing the reason why, or the reason why an exact citation is impossible. That is the whole point. Not "we should support Russian aggression" -- and I'm sure nobody who raised the concern, save for real spam bots, really thinks like what Linus assumed.
As I have already said it out loud in one of the emails, I really hoped Linus Torvalds would have known better. BUT I'll take this as an achievement -- I assume it's pretty hard to get Linus Torvalds to behave this way.