Comment by skrtskrt
10 months ago
A fundamental problem here not yet discussed directly here is how few maintainers there really are for a software project of this magnitude and importance. Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time.
Now it is certainly somewhat the fault of the maintainers themselves for turning off thousand if not tens of thousands of eager, well-intentioned wannabe contributors over the decades, if not through their attitudes and lack of interpersonal skills, then through impenetrable build systems and hostility towards ergonomic changes.
But forget the eager amateurs - it is unconscionable that major technology companies & cloud providers don't each have damn near an army helping out with Linux and similar technologies - even the parts that do not directly benefit them! - instead of just shoving it into servers so they can target ads for cheap plastic crap 0.000000001% better than they did last week.
> Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time.
Greg pointed out in that email thread that:
> over 80% of the contributions come from company-funded developers. [1]
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2025020738-observant-rocklike-7...
Is that really the right statistic? Seems like the relevant one would be the number of maintainers whose maintenance work is company-funded. (Ex, I'd imagine it would be quite bad if most contributions were from company-funded developers but had to be upstreamed by non-company-funded volunteers.)
From other discussion in that thread, it does appear that most maintainers are employed by companies to work on Linux. That doesn't mean that all the work these maintainers do is paid, as there are also comments indicating that many of these paid contributors do work on their own time when it doesn't align with their company priorities.
I posted that statistic to demonstrate that the kernal project isn't a typical underfunded, almost purely volunteer open source project as implied by many of the kneejerk comments here.
> major technology companies & cloud providers don't each have ...
... they have, and they are selling that as premium. it's the classic "open core" model for the cloud era.