> Does anyone have any clue what makes any of us hack on this thing at
> all? It's pretty simple, whats fun, interesting, and enjoyable to
> work on, that is what we're going to hack on. Straight forward. I
> happened to enjoy making a system solid, but not nearly as much as I
> enjoy designing and implementing the latest and greatest.
>
> But to hear someone go "HEY! That's not it, don't be sympathetic to
> the developers, whats wrong with you! We need a stable kernel so that
> we don't get ripped apart in the trade rags!", sorry that kills all my
> desire to work on it.
Volunteer software development is ideal for new features,
but rather bad for maintenance. Maintenance is not fun.
Maintenance should be done by the commercial distributers.
Possible incentive: if Linus or LI ever gets that trademark,
license it to any distributer that contributes 2% back to
pay for old kernel maintenance. It is not fair otherwise,
because unhelpful distributers still gain from the work
paid for by the others.