• onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    People figuratively told me to shut up about the Linux Foundation’s less than meager funding of the linux kernel (~2%), but this is exactly what happens because of it. It’s stuck in the 90s because a few oldies earned well enough to be able to dedicate their time to it. Young blood doesn’t have time nor the funds to fight an uphill battle against the greybeards.

    Imagine if the situation were reversed and the Linux Foundation spent 98% of its 268M on the Linux Kernel. Imagine the amount of developers that would be fighting to get an internship there and make a career as a kernel dev/maintainer/technical writer/manager/whatever… Rust, better hardware support, better code coverage, modern contribution methods (not a damn mailing list), CI/CD, automated testing, better fuzzing, bounties, and so much more would be possible. Instead they spent…20% or something on AI.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Corbin@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Well, I don’t want to pull the kernel-hacker card, but it sounds like you might not have experienced being yelled at by Linus during a kernel summit. It’s not fun and not worth the money. Also it’s well-known that LF can’t compete with e.g. Collabora or Red Hat on salary, so the only folks who stick around and focus on Linux infrastructure for the sake of Linux are bureaucrats, in the sense of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

      • Cris@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I’m kinda under the impression that he doesn’t really do that anymore

        • Corbin@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          Watch the video. Wedson is being yelled at by Ted Ts’o. If the general doesn’t yell, but his lieutenants yell, is that really progress? I will say that last time I saw Linus, he was very quiet and courteous, but that likely was because it was early morning and the summit-goers were starting to eat breakfast and drink their coffee.