Re: [ck] Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1

Bill Huey
2007-07-28T20:07:30Z

On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 09:28:36PM +0200, jos poortvliet wrote:
> Your point here seems to be: this is how it went, and it was right. Ok, got
> that. Yet, Con walked away (and not just over SD). Seeing Con go, I wonder
> how many did leave without this splash. How many didn't even get involved at
> all??? Did THAT have to happen? I don't blame you for it - the point is that
> somewhere in the process a valuable kernel hacker went away. How and why? And
> is it due to a deeper problem?

Absolutely, the current Linux community hasn't realized how large the
community has gotten and the internal processes for dealing with new
developers, that aren't at companies like SuSE or RedHat, haven't been
extended to deal with it yet. It comes off as elitism which it partially
is.

Nobody tries to facilitate or understand ideas in the larger community
which locks folks like Con out that try to do provocative things outside
of the normal technical development mindset. He was punished for doing
so and is a huge failure in this community.

Con basically got caught in a scheduler philosophical argument of whether
to push a policy into userspace or to nice a process instead because
of how crappy X is. This is an open argument on how to solve, but it
should not have resulted in really one scheduler over the other. Both
where capable but one is locked out now because of the choices of
current high level kernel developers in Linux.

There are a lot good kernel folks in many different communities that
look at something like this and would be turned off to participating
in Linux development. And I have a good record of doing rather
interesting stuff in kernel.

bill