The Ministry of Digital Development proposed creating its own Linux community

This decision is a response to the exclusion of Russian developers from the global computing community. The ministry called the dismissal of Russian employees working on the Linux kernel discrimination.

“It is necessary to negotiate with them and build our own alternative structure,” said the department representative, without specifying whether cooperation with specific states was discussed.

Postgres Professional Deputy CEO Ivan Panchenko suggested that potential participants in the new community include China, which has made significant progress in operating system development. Vladimir Slinko, senior advisor at Kaspersky OS, believes that removing Russian developers will reduce trust in their patches, making it more difficult to make changes to the main Linux branch, which is important for supporting distributions.

In mid-October, 11 Russian-linked programmers were suspended from participating in maintaining the stability of the Linux operating system kernel. The company’s founder, Linus Torvalds, said on October 23 that the decision was due to the need to comply with international sanctions against Russia. He added that the legal details of the decision will not be discussed publicly.

• In June, the US Treasury expanded sanctions against Russian companies. As of September 12, American IT companies are prohibited from providing services to clients in Russia. Including the sale of software for the design of IT systems and infrastructure, cloud services and solutions for business management, design and production (software covered) and the provision of consultations.
• On October 1, ABBYY fired almost all Russian developers in one day. Up to 300 people in the company’s offices around the world could be laid off. One of the employees, in conversation with RB.RU, confirmed his dismissal. The company explained this decision as a “global business transformation.”