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 shows that the patch he contributed as a company employee was rejected , and the kernel maintainer responded 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.
Foreign technology media The Register believes that the above two incidents will not cause inconvenience to Russia, and these measures will not prevent Russian companies from researching related codes or using the codes in the way they want. It doesn't even make it harder for them, but it makes it impossible for the rest of the world to benefit from it. The Register also says that sanctioning FOSS development is a poor practice - meaning that any effective improvements will only benefit the sanctioned region, thereby harming the sanctioned region.