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Why Linux Is Not Attracting Young Developers

Posted by Soulskill on from the beards-are-going-out-of-style dept.

judeancodersfront writes "Jonathan Corbet recently pointed out at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that the Linux kernel team was getting older and not attracting young developers. This article suggests the Linux kernel no longer has the same appeal to young open source developers that it did 10 years ago. Could it be that the massive code base and declining sense of community from corporate involvement has driven young open source programmers elsewhere?"

1 of 742 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Monolithic Kernel = Death of Self-Teaching by Athanasius · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...the thing has gotten so big now [what is it - like 20,000 files which get compiled in the basic kernel?]

    But that's counting each and every file system, each and every architecture and most significantly each and every hardware driver. The amount of code you need to understand to be able to, for instance, write a new network driver, is substantially less than the totality of the Linux kernel source.

    Out of ~25k *.[ch] files I count ~9k in drivers alone, plus ~1k in sound. There's ~1.5k in fs and kernel has ~200. Although arch has ~10k only ~700 of those are for x86. Yes, this is a very rough and ready, not to mention incomplete, set of figures, but you get the idea.