Re: On community influencing (was Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] rust: add dma coherent allocator abstraction.)

Greg KH
2025-02-07T10:51:21Z

On Fri, Feb 07, 2025 at 07:20:03PM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
> And I do believe the fact that essentially all high-level Linux kernel
> maintainers and contributors are paid by corporations to do it is a
> major factor that has caused this community to become wildly out of
> touch with what it means to be a community FOSS project.

Please note, that ever since I started keeping track of this type of
thing, way back in 2003 or so, it has been the case that over 80% of the
contributions come from company-funded developers. Which means it
really goes back before that as well.

And that's good, it means that we have backing to do this properly, from
the companies that benifit from it. To not have that would make it much
harder for any of this to work properly at all.

So don't try to play the "you all work for companies" card, that isn't
going to fly as obviously we all speak for ourselves here, and our
companies _know_ they can't tell us what to do, but they give us insight
into the problems that they have with Linux in order for us to help
change it to make it better for everyone.

Because again, everyone has the same problems (individuals and
companies), and so solving it for one "group", solves it for everyone.

thanks,

greg k-h