Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

Posted Nov 26, 2023 17:30 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout by flussence
Parent article: Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

> I do have hope it can be fixed, but it probably requires lots of outside specialist help.

I don't see how that may be fixed. Linux started as a volunteer project where people were not paid. Today the majority of contributors come from commercial companies and for many of them kernel development is a regular job.

Now that people who started as free volunteers and later got job in commercial companies (do we even have maintainers who work on kernel without that being either their full-time job or part-time job mentioned in their work contract?… maybe is some fringe areas like M68K support, I guess…) tell to these developers that do work for money and expect that they would do something for free… why should they? How does that work?

It's time to admit that kernel is commercial project and start acting accordingly. Hordes of volunteers couldn't arrive if most people work on kernel to earn money! For them if job doesn't make it's easier to earn money then it's not worth doing.

Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

Posted Nov 27, 2023 12:43 UTC (Mon) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966) [Link]

I think people being paid to work on Linux is good. It allows those people to spend large blocks of time on it (that's very difficult for most people if it's not part of their job and they can only do odd bits on evenings and weekends) and spending large blocks of time is necessary for most things if you want to advance reasonably quickly.

But while most kernel developers are now paid Linux hasn't fallen into the trap of giving their employers too much technical say and becoming a corporate project. No manager of a kernel developper can say "I know it's half baked but merge it now beacuse marketing wants it" and Linux largely maintains the "it'll ship when it's ready" and "longterm maintability is important" mindsets that are missing in most commercial projects.

Companies paying kernel developpers do get some say in the "what" (ie if they're interested in some particular area of the kernel, say power management or networking, they can hire specialists in those areas and ask them to work on that rather than other parts of then kernel) but they don't get a say on the "how" (ie what implementation is acceptable, that lies with the maintainers and, ultimately, Linus).

Of course what works for Linux (by virtue of being a "commons" on which most higher level stuff is now built) probably doesn't work for a lot of other OSS projects which still struggle to find developpers.