You're missing that they added their personnal email in the maintainer file by using their ibm email, in the commit where they were supposed to remove themselves.
Employees giving themselves personnal privileges using company resources, while being specifically asked to remove themselves from those that they had has employee, is vastly different context than "he was there as a hobby and ibm cracked down on him".
And what authority did they have to add someone (themselves on personal email)? None personal. The one that they had as an employee.
Would they had been added to that list using their personal email if they removed themselves THEN asked someone with the authority to do so to add them back on their personal account? Everything points to no. Ergo they misused their employees position.
The Linux kernel maintainer list isn't IBMs to grant or deny permission to. The other kernel maintainers had no objections to Lijun staying on as a reviewer, just IBM did.
> Would they had been added to that list using their personal email if they removed themselves THEN asked someone with the authority to do so to add them back on their personal account? Everything points to no.
What makes you say this? No commits make it into the official Linux kernel without being peer-reviewed and approved. The original change was signed off by another (non-IBM) maintainer, and would have to be signed-off again by Linus before making it into the official kernel. There have been many cases where a developer stopped working on the kernel in a professional capacity, but continued to do so in a personal capacity, and none of the Linux maintainers objected to this. Why would they? The developer has valuable experience and knowledge about the code base.
I don't see any aspect of abuse of authority/privilege here, just an employee/employer contract dispute.
I am not missing how they changed emails, I was in fact commenting on that. Being reviewer (vs maintainer) is not having any special privilege, it's just subscribing to emails.
Employees giving themselves personnal privileges using company resources, while being specifically asked to remove themselves from those that they had has employee, is vastly different context than "he was there as a hobby and ibm cracked down on him".