TLDR;
It literally hurts me personally to see this happening. It’s like a kick in the gut. I used to be proud about having had an involvement with the Linux kernel community in a previous life. This doesn’t feel like the community I remember being part of.
Most of these developers do work for companies that are paying them to make contributions so, it stands to reason that the kernel additions or changes are of particular use to those companies. Nothing is stopping them from continuing to make changes on their own fork for their own benefit, but that means drifting away from the mainline kernel. That adds extra work and overhead, which is the point.
I’ve seen nothing to suggest this has been identified as a concern, but modern warfare systems do often run on Linux. Some of these developers might already be contributing directly to the war. Also, economics are just as much a part of warfare as bullets and bombs. In this case particularly, economic factors are almost certainly going to be critical to ending the conflict.
I still maintain this is a pretty weak argument. And it does nothing to address the question of what do these devs contribute to instead because it’s not likely their suddenly gonna become jobless and dependent on the state. These are highly skilled and motivated developers just based on what ive heard about getting contributions into the mainline kernel. I just hope they don’t get recruited to write drone targetting systems because we’ve decided to ban them from contributing to a project everyone benefits from.