Are top Linux developers losing the will to code?

Core Linux developers are finding themselves managing and checking, rather than coding, as the number of kernel contributors grows and the contributor network becomes more complex. Core Linux developers are finding themselves managing and checking, rather than coding, as the number of kernel contributors grows and the contributor network becomes more complex. That is the view of Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co author of online book Linux Device Drivers.

In the latest kernel release the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said. Kroah-Hartman himself is now doing more code reviewing than coding. "That's all I do, is read patches these days," he said during a discussion at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa last month.

In theory the kernel development process involves changes going from the original author through a file or driver maintainer, to the maintainer of a major subsystem such as PCI or SCSI, to Andrew Morton for testing and finally to Linus Torvalds for a kernel release. But Kroah-Hartman said the process was much more complicated: "I tried graphing that, and that's not what happens. It's a mess. There's routing all over the place."