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Posted Feb 7, 2025 14:54 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: New contributors by pizza
Parent article: Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping
But companies have motivation (or rather the people within them do). If the kernel community actively demotivate outsiders - paid or not - that's a bad thing.
What's the difference between the kernel community de-motivating contributors, and a company de-motivating customers? NOTHING. Both are actively shrinking the pool of people willing to do business with them, and both are actively hastening their own demise.
Whether I'm paid or not has nothing to with whether I have a bad experience or not. And if I have that bad experience, next time I'm asked to go back there I will actively resist. If I'm paid and my boss has to pull rank, that puts him off and makes him less likely to want to deal with them too.
Even - or especially! - if they're paid to do so, you do not want to give the people the motivation to NOT come back.
Cheers,
Wol
Posted Feb 7, 2025 15:24 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
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I'm sorry, I didn't make my point clear.
Companies pay folks to contribute stuff, but once that "stuff" is contributed (eg add a new driver or a fix for an existing driver) from their employer's perspective, there is no longer any need for those folks to continue engaging with the kernel as a whole, so they are tasked with doing other things instead. Voila, drive-by contribution.
While those individuals _could_ continue to do other things with the Linux, but that would have to come from their off-the-clock time, and unlike $dayjob where you do what you're told, on one's own time there are innumerable other things you could do. Such as being with with their families or going outside, ie "anything other than spending even more hours staring at a computer screen performing unpaid, hard, thankless *work*)
In order to gain the level of expertise and experience necessary to rise up to the level of a subsystem maintainer, one has to spend literally *years* getting your hands dirty on Linux's internals on a more-than-full-time basis. Very few folks have the opportunity to do so.
Posted Feb 7, 2025 16:35 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
And you don't seem to have understood mine.
If my boss tells me to do something I find unpleasant, I will not want to repeat the experience! And in jurisdictions where "hire and fire" is not the norm, my boss will find it very hard to make me do it again. "Give it to someone else!". Payment has NOTHING to do with it.
And if the boss can't find people willing to interact with the kernel community, that could be another reason why so many companies ship outdated kernels with their gear - it's not that they don't want to ship updated stuff, it's that they can't find staff willing to go through the grief of upstreaming the stuff they need ...
(People of that calibre are likely people that could just walk if they so desired ...)
Cheers,
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Wol