Kernel Contributor Corbet Says Linux Community Is 'Intimidating'

An anonymous reader writes "Key Linux kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet has admitted the developer community can be intimidating and hard to break into. He highlighted the issue during his Linux.conf.au presentation on the Linux kernel. Corbet expressed concern about the exclusivity of the kernel community, but says it's doing well regardless. He said in a period of just over a year, 55,000 individual changes from 2,700 developers (representing 370 employers) were made to the kernel, equaling 2.8 million lines of code. Corbet called the process 'alive and active.'"

Comments

I fault the internet

[BobMcD]

I don't think this is necessarily a flaw in Linux kernel development, because I've seen the same sort of thing all over every internet-based community. Think about the forums, chat rooms, and even discussions on this very site. 'Good' input is secondary to both 'loud' and 'popular', to the deficit of the community.

Part of it is that the text removes a good deal of the context behind the words. To be sure...

However I think there exists a general lack of morality/ethics/whatever in terms on internet communication. Never in a town hall meeting is it considered productive to shout that your opponents are "F~ING STUPID" and yet this tactic works exceedingly well on the internet. I assume that in person this behavior is taboo, but online anything goes. At a minimum you would pretend to listen and use some form of tactful technique to move forward. Online the aggressor seems to hope the opposing voices will simply stop participating in the conversation.

Does anyone have any links to research or the like on this topic?

Further, is there anything resembling Roberts Rules of Order for an online forum, email, etc?

Back to the topic at hand, what if the Linux kernel developers held voice-based meetings on controversial topics? Or at least adopted a code of conduct that demanded civility?