Linus Torvalds: Speaks on Fatigue and the Future of Linux

in this conversation Linus tals describes and discusses maintainer fatigue in the Linux open source Community highlighting many things and is definitely interesting as he talks to Durk who is the head of the open source program office at Verizon let's see what Miss's thoughts are on maintainer fatigue but this is actually where I wanted to go next because if you look at the Top If you look at the people uh at at the at the sub maintainer level U most of them these days are either like Greg and have no hair or they are that's rough or they are like the two of us and they have a very it's not completely gray yeah some people kid themselves at the gray yet others have accepted that but kidding aside the the leadership the what you call at the top of the maintainer tree uh we are certainly seeing a significant aging there obviously as time goes by that has to happen but if I if I look 5 years into the future and a lot of of people will start hitting the 60s and the first ones will approach the 70s so where do you see this going this is a fantastic question by Dirk poised as what's going to happen to the future of Open Source and specifically the lenux colonel as a majority of the maintainers are going to be aged out so I mean it's a to some degree it's a good problem to have I mean so the colonel Summit was what a month ago something like that three weeks three weeks ago and and it was actually the first year when I personally reacted to the fact that yes a lot of us are going gray but at the same time part of the reason really is the maintainer Summit is we try to limit it to about 30 people or so of those 30 people at least three of them had been around for more than 30 years so they had been around since like the first year of Linux existing and the fact that they are still around and still active and still end up coming to maintainer Summits means that yes they are older and grayer but it also means that we actually have a community where people do stick around which is a fantastic thing because you don't have a community if people don't tend to stick around that is one of the things that people have argued in the past whether or not the Linux Community is not welcoming of new people but you could also argue the fact that people who have been there for so long wouldn't have remained there if it was let's say a toxic place to contribute code to um but that's a that's a double it absolutely and um and it's for example one of the things I liked about the rust side of the colonel was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers and that was the rust meeting and and uh we can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people we had a in the maintainer at the maintainer summit we had this clear division between the the file system people who were very careful and very stayed and they cared deeply about their code being 100% correct because if you have a bug in a file system the data on your dis may be gone so these people take themselves very serious and then you have the driver people who are bit more especially the GPU people seem to be like anything and and and you did notice that the on the driver side you have a much easier time finding young people and and that is traditionally how we've grown a lot of maintainers including I mean Greg with no hair so this is an interesting Insight uh by lennus himself there are clearly portions of the Linux open source Community involving different subsystems where younger people tend to migrate too but that's not to say that they don't move over to various other subsystems for example the file system which lennus mentioned there's going to be people who join the community trying to get started with something fresh and new and not necessarily caring about breaking things but as they age as they progress in their contributions that doesn't stop them from moving to different subsystems is what I believe is trying to be said here so I apologize great you can you can beat me up later I mean my my forehead is getting larger every year so what can I say it's it's not long not far away from me um let's switch gears completely and talk about something else so that is kind of the end of the conversation here when it comes to maintainers and maintainer fatigue of course there's going to be challenges and stress associated with the role of a Linux konel maintainer because you can already tell there's a difficulty finding maintainers it requires large technical skills but also a certain level of evaluation ability to their own code contributions while many people contribute code not many people stay around to become maintainers as mentioned mentioned by some of the numbers given out the commitment and ability to work collaboratively with others is really what drives people to stay there's of course this broader issue of the Linux ecosystem the open source community in general to try to find solutions to help bring in more maintainers to eliminate this fatigue whether or not that's exploring new technologies including AI including rust and much much more it is refreshing to see that Linus's thoughts on this is to welcome whatever technology or whoever wants to help and that's the best that they can do at this point in the Journey of Linux let me know what you think about contributors or maintainers of Linux do you think the open source contributors will fade away Into The Ether over the coming decades or is there going to be a shift in mentality to keep maintaining the kernel because we're getting better and better Technologies and more and more people available who understand how to code let me know in the comments section below I'd love to hear from you catch me a great community on Discord and I'll catch you in another video thanks for watching

Channel: SavvyNik

Views: 60,702

Keywords: Linus Torvalds, Programming, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, Linux, SavvyNik, Linux Open Source, Linux Summit, Linux Conference, Torvalds, Linus, Creator of Linux, linux kernel, llm, developers, dev, open source, open source programming, programmer fatigue, burn out, developer burn out, dev burn out, programmer burn out, burnt out, linux, linux programming, linux open source, linux operating system

Id: j5AJFHMuE2U

Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2024