I’ve used Linux for more than twenty years. I watched it grow from a community project into critical global infrastructure. I disagreed with many decisions along the way — including systemd being forced into the core — but I accepted them as technical or organizational tradeoffs.
October 2024 was different.
That was the moment the Linux kernel stopped being neutral.
A group of Russian maintainers were removed from the Linux MAINTAINERS file. This did not happen because of malicious code, sabotage, or technical failures. It happened because of email domains, national origin, or past employment connected to U.S. sanctions lists.
Linus Torvalds approved the change.
Criticism was dismissed as “Russian troll factories.”
The decision stood.
That distinction matters.
This was not moderation of behaviour.
It was enforcement of geopolitics.
What changed
Linux has always had politics around it, but the kernel itself followed a simple rule:
Code is judged by what it does — not by who wrote it.
That rule was broken.
Today it is Russia.
Tomorrow it will be China.
Then Iran. India. Or any country that becomes politically inconvenient.
This is not speculation. It is a pattern.
Why this is not hypothetical
We have already seen what happens when global infrastructure stops being neutral.
In 1999, during the Kargil War, the United States degraded GPS accuracy over South Asia. GPS was marketed as a global utility. In practice, it was selectively disabled for geopolitical reasons.
The consequences were concrete, not theoretical:
-
Navigation failures
-
Misfires and targeting errors
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Friendly fire incidents
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Civilian and military deaths
A shared system became a weapon.
That precedent now exists inside the Linux kernel.
The precedent Linux just accepted
Once a project enforces sanctions at the contributor level, it stops being global infrastructure and becomes a policy tool.
Neutrality is not something you partially abandon.
Once it is gone, it does not come back.
The logic scales cleanly — and dangerously.
| Scenario | Likely Outcome |
|---|---|
| Taiwan conflict | .cn maintainers removed |
| Iranian hardware support | Code reverted for “compliance” |
| India resists U.S. policy | Contributors labeled “risk” |
None of this requires malice.
Only lawyers.
Fragmentation is not a threat — it’s the result
This will not end with the United States.
Russia already maintains forks.
China is funding openKylin and HarmonyOS Next.
Other states will follow.
Once Linux is no longer neutral ground, every government builds a “sovereign” fork — officially for compliance, unofficially for control.
That is how shared infrastructure dies.
What Linux was supposed to be
The kernel was never meant to pick sides in wars.
It was supposed to be boring, impartial, and technical.
Code in. Code reviewed. Code merged or rejected.
Linus Torvalds once openly fought corporations that tried to control Linux.
Now he enforces exclusions because it is easier than resisting bureaucracy.
This is not about defending Putin.
It is about refusing to let free software turn into another GPS switch any superpower can flip.
Where this leads
If Linux can be weaponized against Russian hobbyists today, it can be weaponized against anyone tomorrow.
And when the rest of the world decides it cannot trust a politicized kernel and builds something else instead, that outcome should not be surprising.
That is exactly where this ends.
— A Linux user who just watched his favorite project commit suicide by politics.
