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Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Actually I'm interested how it looks legally ( it somebody cares about it at all ). Whether the Russian contributors could ask to revert their changes as they most likely never signed the contract to transfer their code copyrights. For sure it will have a big impact on foss because if you have at least one American and Russian contributors, you may get in the biggest shitshow. Additionally if I was considering now to become a contributors, I'd be wondering if it's worthy at all to work for free and then to be banned no thanks for whole free work years
IANAL, but I think the general answer is no. When someone contribute code to an open source project, although they aren't giving up their copyright, they do grant the recipient (and the rest of the world, for that matter) a license to use their code. In case of Linux, this is the GNU Public License. Unless GPL has a section about license revocation that I am not aware of, you won't be able to take your code back.
So I think good luck for foss movement. Hopefully, forking that project won't be illegal because otherwise foss will die