Keynote: Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux Foundation) - "I Don't Want Your Code"
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in discussions of maintainer burden and why companies benefit from upstreaming drivers, as an explanation straight from a lead kernel maintainer.
What it is
Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linaro keynote on contributing to the Linux kernel, explaining why maintainers prefer upstreamed code and how they view contributions.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Cites pmoriarty · 2017-08 · on “Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community”
"They don't need or even want your help" There was in fact a talk given by Greg Kroah-Hartman, one Linux's lead maintainers, about development for the Linux kernel which he titled "I Don't Want Your Code" . [this video]
Cites matheusmoreira · 2018-05 · on “Libui: a portable GUI library for C”
>implies that the requester's time is less valuable than the project maintainer's It is. In large projects, there are relatively few maintainers responsible for evaluating the requests, reports and code from lots of people. They're scarce resources. [this video] [LINK]
Cites matheusmoreira · 2021-06 · on ““Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches””
> maybe it's time to have sub-maintainers to whom such tasks could be delegated They already have subsystem maintainers. The result was an even faster process. [this video]
Cites matheusmoreira · 2021-06 · on ““Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches””
[this video] > If you're hired to do this stuff, you're on your own, you better know what you're doing. Huawei pays professional developers to contribute to the kernel. Of course they should be held to a higher standard. They should be working on something substantial, not fixing minor problems. Surely there are far more important things to work on. Failing to prioritize important issues coupled with incentives for kernel contribution means they are putting in minimum effort for maximum personal gain at the expense of maintainers.
Cites matheusmoreira · 2021-10 · on “Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens”
> it's not the publishing but the use which is proscribed - same applies for engineering Exactly. I think there should be an exception for free and open source software though. We have lots of free software designed to be used by people. I don't think these programmers should be held liable. Many of them are amateurs and volunteers. The chilling effect would simply be too great. I'm reminded of Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk about kernel contributors. [this video] > My goal, of me, as a developer and to make Linux succeed, is to help [amateurs, unknown individuals] out. > If you're hired to do this stuff, you're on your own and you better know what you're doing. I think he's right. At the time, roughl
Cites matheusmoreira · 2023-03 · on “Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code to Be Removed”
Because then consumers get hardware that works out of the box on Linux. That's how good corporations contribute. [this video]
Cites jamespwilliams · 2023-09 · on “Linux Kernel Maintainers, why are they so grumpy? [pdf]”
[this video] for a video version of this talk One funny bit about the talk, which isn’t mentioned in the slides, is that he actually gave the talk at Linaro (the very same company who were called out in the slides as a case study of submitting a particularly bad set of patches)
Cites matheusmoreira · 2023-12 · on “A Nouveau graphics driver update”
Because it leads to straight up better products and companies that don't upstream the drivers get outcompeted by the ones that do. Greg Kroah-Hartman explains it: [this video]