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Linus Torvalds Got Confused About 'When and Where' Maintainer's Summit Is Going To be Held, So Organizers Moved the Entire Conference (linuxfoundation.org)

Posted by msmash on from the what-choices-did-they-have-really? dept.

From The Linux Foundation's mailing list: Last Friday (just before Labor Day) I learned that Linus had gotten confused about when and where the Maintainer's Summit was going to be held this year. And most unfortunately, he has already scheduled a family vacation overlapping with the week of the Maintainer's Summit. Over the weekend, I've been conferring with folks from the Linux Foundation, Linus, and the Maintainer's / Kernel Summit program committee. We explored a lot of options, but ultimately there were only two choices that were workable:
1) Have the Maintainer's Summit in Vancouver, without Linus.
2) Move the Maintainer's Summit to Edinburgh, with Linus.

Curiously enough, Linus suggested option #1. And while holding the Maintainer's Summit without Linus might be an interesting experiment, ultimately, the Program Committee had a strong consensus that moving it Summit to Edinburgh was the better option.

This means that the Maintainer's Summit will take place in Edinburgh, on Monday afternoon, October 22nd. As a reminder, the Maintainer's Summit is an invite-only workshop, with ~30 people attending. The focus of the Maintainer's Summit is process and development issues, *not* technical issues. The Kernel Summit track will still be held in Vancouver alongside Plumber's. Technical discussions will take place there; we simply won't have the time, or necessarily, the right people, to have technical discussions at the Maintainer's Summit.

6 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense to me by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you scheduled an Infinity Gem convention over Thanos' personal time off, seems like you would move that convention too.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  2. He gave them two hints ... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He gave them two hints:
    (1) I got my dates mixed up and I cannot attend due to prior commitments.
    (2) Don't reschedule, just carry on without me.

    Don't you guys get it? He may want the community to be less dependent, more able to stand on its own, not need the hand holding.

    1. Re:He gave them two hints ... by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree with this assessment - and I think summit organizers made a mistake here. Linus isn't going to live forever, and if Linux is going to survive without him, the kernel maintainers need to learn to work without Linus.

      Maybe next year he should just tell them, "I'm delegating decisions to these persons and taking a three week hiatus, have at."

      --
      Finding God in a Dog
    2. Re:He gave them two hints ... by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't you guys get it? He may want the community to be less dependent

      As usual, Linus' hints were too subtle. Will he ever learn to speak his mind in no uncertain terms?

      --
      Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
    3. Re:He gave them two hints ... by Shinobi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Quite a lot of people fail to appreciate just how bad, and how sudden, burnout can be. How you can go from something you love one month, and the next month, you suddenly start feeling physically ill while doing it. You lose what spark drove you and everything starts to become by rote. You start to only care about getting it done, no matter how, instead of getting it done right/safe, for example.

      Note, I'm not talking about Linus here, but in general. A colleague of mine went from loving what he was doing, to noticing that he was just starting the trend of going through the motions, so he quickly decided that either he could continue working in the field, with a diminishing spark, or he could keep coding as a hobby, and perhaps, in the long run, retain the spark. He chose to keep it as a hobby, and is now switching career.

  3. Re: Why not the USA by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > USA is the bastion of freedom and democracy in the world

    Bullshit

    (Clip from HBO's "The Newsroom")

    It used it be. And can be again.

    Wake me up when:

    * music, home economics, shop, and finance are mandatory classes in school again,
    *we stop teaching math by rote which kills all curiosity in the subject,
    * we stop idolizing sport stars and actors who make millions -- who will be forgotten in a few decades and instead have more and better Teachers who struggle to make a decent wage
    * we stop spending Billions fighting another man's rich war
    * we stop the insanity of Imaginary Property and the obnoxious duration
    * we stop corporations hijacking culture for the sake of profit
    * we stop the visual pollution of advertising
    * we stop tracking everything fucking thing a person does and selling the data to the highest bidder
    * we take security breaches serious and enforce fines for when personal information is hacked / stolen
    * we stop censoring people who think different
    * etc.

    --
    Main St. built America,
    Walls St. destroyed America.