Getting called "Paid Actor" by Linus Torvalds

On Oct 22 (or Oct 23 depending on where you are), Greg K-H posted a commit to remove a bunch of kernel maintainers citing "various compliance requirements". The commit was posted right before it was included in a pull request, without time for comments from pretty much anyone else. This has triggered some concerns on transparency in the Linux kernel community -- rather than referring to exact compliance requirements or state that they are under some type of NDA, Greg (and Linus Torvalds) have chosen to use the very vague wording to justify a big change.

Some have (IMHO, rightfully) raised a concern that this type of changes should at least have a better citation on why. They may be required legally to do so, or they are under some NDA, but referring to the existence of said law or NDA itself seems to be the minimum for transparency. Without citation, this sets a very dangerous precedent that Linus, or Greg, or anyone who threatens them with lawsuit, can influence the Linux kernel in unpredictable ways that no one else will be able to have an early eye on.

One of my friends sent a reverse patch for this to the list citing these concerns. This triggered responses from another bunch of people, some of which may rightfully be spam bots. However, instead of addressing the concern publicly, Greg chose to send a private correspondence to one of them seeking to defuse the situation (I assume), which didn't help. On the other hand, Linus Torvalds begun to call out people who raised concerns as Russian state-sponsored spam, and said that reverting this patch is equal to "supporting Russian aggression".

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