Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 May 2008 18:53:20 -0400 | From | Theodore Tso <> | Subject | Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] How many contributors are we losing |
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On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 03:05:12PM -0700, Luck, Tony wrote: > > Probably some of them moved on to do different things (or were > promoted to manage people who still work on Linux).
There's an interesting unspoken assumption here that people who stop contributing patches which end up in the Linux kernel mailing "no longer working on the kernel", or "no longer working in Linux", or "left the community", or (even more of a stretch) people that we have somehow driven away or that we have failed because they didnt come back.
Looking at the list.....
> Werner Almesberger
Original author of LILO, does networking research using the Linux kernel. (Has shown up and presented papers at various conferences such as FISL and Linux.conf.au.)
> Stephen Tweedie
Still working at Red Hat, my last knowledge was that he was in Xen hell.....
> Kylene Jo Hall
Member of IBM Linux Technology Center, Security Team. The security team does a lot more than kernel work....
> Dustin Kirkland
Was a member of the IBM Linux Technology Center, now working for Canonical on Ubuntu's Enterprise Server Team
> Suparna Bhattacharya
Member of the IBM Linux Technology Center, on leave to get an advanced degree.
> Junio C Hamano
Git maintainer. :-)
So lots of stories, and there are plenty of people who are still working at a company doing Linux work; they're just not happening to contribute to a kernel. They might be fixing bugs for customers, or forward porting Xen for an enterprise distro, or many other things that are intimately related to the Linux kernel --- just not in ways that result in patches into mainline.
So if we really want some hard numbers on how many kernel developers we are "losing", we would probably have to try to contact some of these people and see if they are willing to answer a survey. But given your numbers, I really don't think it's as big a problem as some people make it out to be....
- Ted
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