[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Guenter Roeck]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 11:09:38AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> 
> I guess I'm suggesting the opposite of a "professional maintainer".
> Some people thrive at being the center of a subsystem, as I did for
> some time with wireless.  But burnout is a problem, and I think we
> can limit some of that if somehow we can encourage less expansive
> roles for individual maintainers.
> 

I hear you.

However, having individual maintainers with a high level of responsibility
and sense of ownership is one of the reasons why the Linux kernel
development model works as well as it does.

In a corporate environment, there is often no sense of ownership in a
specific piece of code. Quite often there _is_ no owner. As a result,
engineers don't feel the need to keep the code clean. They need to make
a change, they make it, they move on. The code gets more and more messy
and buggy over time, and no one really cares.

Whatever we change, we need to make sure this doesn't happen with the
Linux kernel, or it will fall apart quickly.

Guenter