Comment by marssaxman

> Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows they exist.

I am surprised by the thought that I might be one of those people. On paper, I seem like exactly the sort of person who ought to feel confident getting involved in Linux kernel development. I have decades of programming experience, I've been using Linux since the '90s, and I've spent most of my career building system software and developer tools. I've written drivers, filesystems, memory managers, embedded RTOS kernels, compilers, linkers, debuggers, VMs, runtime libraries, you name it. I've grepped through the Linux kernel source plenty of times. I am a thoroughgoing free software advocate and I've been GPLing all my personal projects for many years; in fact I am currently fortunate enough to be making my living developing free software.

And yet - it has never once occurred to me that I should get involved in the Linux kernel project. A friend actually suggested it last week, and my reaction was an instant, wordless sense of deflation - uffff, wow, "no way." Why? I didn't really investigate the feeling at the time, but it occurs to me now that I simply don't want to deal with a lot of hostile, critical "are you good enough" attitude, and that's what I expect I would get if I went and bothered those people.

Who knows what might have happened in an alternate universe where the kernel community were more welcoming; perhaps there would have been other reasons not to participate - but it's easy for me to believe that you're right, and there are lots of people who might have something to offer who are just quietly getting on with their lives and not even considering it.