Key detail: they’re not dropping it because they’re giving up, the judge dismissed it without prejudice, which means that in 4 years they can pick the case back up. Under a Trump DoJ the case would likely have ended with prejudice, closing it permanently.

I haven’t gone through all their work, but some of the delisted maintainers were working on driver support for Baikal, a Russia based electronics company. Their work includes semiconductors, ARM processors. Given the sanctions against Russia, especially for dual use stuff like domestic semiconductors, I would expect that Linus and other maintainers were told or concluded that by signing off and merging their code they’d be personally violating sanctions.

I recently removed in editor AI cause I noticed I was acquiring muscle memory for my brain, not thinking through the rest past the start of a snippet that would get an LLM to auto complete. I’m still using LLMs, particularly for languages and libraries I’m not familiar with, but using the artifacts editors in ChatGPT and Claude.

If you read carefully this is actually very similar to the Steam news. I doubt Valve or GOG care, but generally the games are “sold” by the publisher as non transferable licenses for you to play them. So the part that matters isn’t up to them.