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

difficult?

[phantomfive]

He is kind of right, but I would say the relative challenge of understanding the kernel code is far greater than the social challenge of getting involved. I mean, you can't expect to just sign up to lklm and say, "Hey guys, assign me a project!" Why would they even believe that you can handle it? As likely as not, you'll just make things worse. Start by understanding the code, doing some debugging, and once you are actually doing productive things, people will be more likely to believe you can do more productive things.

Re:difficult?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say the relative challenge of understanding the kernel code is far greater than the social challenge of getting involved.

I'd say you're not a real nerd.

Re:difficult?

[Angst Badger]

The larger problem here isn't that the Linux kernel group is exclusive -- though it probably does manage to deny itself (and its users) some good ideas as a result. It's that the FOSS world has developed a dominant monoculture that very definitely marginalizes alternative approaches that, both in the short term and in the long term, retards progress in other areas. Yes, there are FOSS alternatives to Linux, but we have arrived at a state where there is Linux, and then there is everything else. And that "everything else", excepting perhaps the *BSDs which are competitors in the Unix clone space rather than fundamental alternatives, generally lack maturity and application support.

That's only an acceptable state of affairs if you think Unix (and Linux's implementation of Unix) represent some kind of final end state in OS development. This is by no means a criticism of Linux in and of itself -- it's a fine OS and I'm glad to have it -- but in terms both of user choice and advancing the state of the art, it's no more healthy to have Linux as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the FOSS world than it was to have Windows as the overwhelmingly dominant player in the broader PC world.

Rather than fretting about getting into the inner sanctums of Linux development, more would be OS developers should be looking at the alternatives (or starting their own, if they have the vision for it). Most will fail, of course, but somewhere out there is a project that, like Linus Torvald's ambitious little toy *nix kernel all those years ago, will someday be a game changer. And even in failure, one learns a great deal -- perhaps enough that one might later find entry into more established circles easier.

And rightly so

[erroneus]

The Linux kernel is not some hobbyist tinker toy. It is an extremely serious, mainstream and global-scale project. If it were more inclusive rather than exclusive, there would be MUCH risk in stability and security as I firmly believe that there would be attempts at installing exploitable code within the kernel. These types of problems have already occurred in F/OSS projects all over and we know that there are parties out there who are willing to to to GREAT lengths to accomplish their goals.

With all this, I have little doubt that the present condition is for the best.