> It does, the Linux kernel maintainers eventually said that's the reason for banning Russian maintainers.

As craftkiller interline in a sibling post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927430): would this not rather imply that you should ban US-American maintainers (at least on some subsystems)?

If Russian maintainers write some Linux kernel code, this will cause no problem for a US export ban. On the other hand, if US-American maintainer does, it might.

According to Linus, “the ‘various compliance requirements’ are not just a US thing”:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEg...

I do not know the details myself.

How does that even work? By definition the code is "exported" to every country since it is open source.

It could be argued that you could ban imports from russia by not allowing them to contribute code, but an export ban is basically impossible.

You can't control where the code goes but you can sanction organizations for working with sanctioned orgs/individuals.

Given that US big tech funds a lot of orgs they will always have a big stake. One could for example filibuster certain Chinese or Russian features/proposals etc for a long time. Or at the last minute vote to do a 180% on a design proposals so US Rival have to redo an implementation. Standard office politics shit.