There have been two recent incidents in which developers from Russian companies were blocked from contributing code to open source software (FOSS).

Sergey Semin is a developer at Russian chipmaker Baikal Electronics. The Linux kernel mailing list says,Patches he contributed as a company employee were rejectedthe kernel maintainer replied with a brief notice:

We are not willing to accept patches from or related to hardware produced by your organization.

We don’t feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization.

The other is also aimed at Russian developers. Alexander Amelkin is an employee of the Russian chipmaker Yadro. Last week, his GitHub account was blocked, and the open source project ipmitool he maintains was also marked as “archived”.

Yadro, the company where Alexander worked, was developing RISC-V chips in 2021, and later became a sanctioned company during the Russia-Ukraine War. As a subsidiary of Microsoft, GitHub undoubtedly needs to abide by US laws, so the sanctioned Yadro will also affect the use of its employees’ accounts.

Alexander said he was not involved in political activities. Even his own employer, although sanctioned, did not directly participate in the war. Even if their civilian server products are considered to have participated in some form of war, the impact of such participation is minimal.