You can look at the thread. The initial one got a lot of replies from a “Vladimir Putin” saying “You should kill yourself NOW!”. The Git commit is even worse, with the a lot of insults. Not what usually happens on that kind of places, not that they are always kind and lovely.
Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?
Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.
So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.
They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.
So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.
You can however Switch to some open source software without having to go full Linux. Introducing Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and so forth can be done in Windows. Software Not working one Linux is often a big problem for switching.
$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.
It is used only as a diplomatic passport for EU representatives. Unlike with a normal French passport, you get diplomatic immunity, to walk through border checkpoints without being searched and so forth.
They are not called passports as the EU is not a country, but it is pretty close:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_laissez-passer
Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.
So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.
There are big money donors, which are not billionaires. The most common one are unions.
The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.
What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.
!europe!europe@feddit.org comes to mind as a somewhat political community, with a non US focus. It however has a lot of Germans in it.
Usually those artist did get some recognition during their life, but never got into the main stream. That changed due to the main stream changing and the people who did like the art showing it again. That is actually rather easy to do with something like the Fediverse. It just requires a download option. Especially when everybody is aware, that the content will be deleted, that would be a decent option.
Also a lot of content on social media in general is very short term. Stuff like politcal discussions are fairly useless after a few months in most cases. So that can be deleted without much care and again, if somebody wants to preserve it, they easily can just download it.