i guess they were "protect"ing their users
:)
Additionally, I have always been curious to know whether the U.S. export ban applies to Linux and any other open source projects
> Of course, our project needs people to work on these systems. If any non-American cryptographer who meets the constraints listed earlier is interested in helping out with embedded cryptography in OpenBSD, please contact us.
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.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEg...
I do not know the details myself.
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.