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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

> The other big problem is the burnout from maintainers, which are often unpaid and could use a lot more support from the billion-dollar companies that benefit from using Linux.

This is the crux of the issue: putting the maintenance burden on unpaid volunteers instead of having the burden be carried by the companies that profit from the 6-year LTS.

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Canonical volunteered to maintain LTS kernels within the community, but upstream refuses to accept Canonical's contributions - ironically because apparently they "don't work within the community". Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/608917/

Canonical maintained them anyway, though, just not officially. Sources: https://lwn.net/Articles/618862/ https://lwn.net/Articles/667925/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/12/15/538. I don't see more recent announcements; I don't know if they stopped because of continuous rejection of their community contributions from upstream, or if they are continuing anyway and I'm not aware.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical. I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical, expressed opinions here are my own. [Edit: I should add that I don't work on the kernel so I feel like I'm as much an outside observer as you probably are]. But I'm not sure I'm even expressing an opinion here - just citing some relevant, publicly verifiable facts.

It switched to your opinion when you said ironically and didn’t list the real reason the upstream patches were rejected.

I'm just going by the article I cited. I don't know any more than the reason given there. And come on: how is refusing contributions when the cited reason is not contributing not ironic?

Minor thing, if you look at the citation it says that they don't want to hand over official control of official branches to Canonical because they don't trust them to engage with the community, with those citations OP must have meant "accept contributions" as "accept canonical being in control of older official kernel branches to decide what patches are accept (even though no one else will)" rather than they are not accepting patches from canonical.

Given Canonical's outright user-hostile decisions in recent past I don't blame kernel devs for not trusting them at all.

Such as? And they still accept redhat contributions so your point is moot anyways.

Snap

The LXD - Incus saga with the linuxcontainers community is a very good indicator of how Canonical would behave in a similar situation.

What sort of user hostile actions would one take on a 5 year old kernel version?

canonical ceased to be relevant with the usability disaster that was the hype-driven unity desktop.

I don't see how the UX of Unity applies to kernel maintenance?

Ubuntu is still pretty widely used for a Linux distro?

There's a difference between a company volunteering money/employees and a company taking over maintenance of the branch itself.

If Canonical was not willing to do the former, it implies the kernel developers were correct.

The Linux Foundation "harvests" a couple hundred million dollars a year [1]. They could easily spend more on maintainers. I can't easily find exact number, but Torvalds is paid between 1-2 million dollars a year by The Linux Foundation. They could support other volunteer maintainers as well.

[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...

The Linux Foundation's 990 form for 2022 is available. Page 2.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...

I have zero issues with Linus being paid 1-2 million dollars per year

if he was paid a flat license fee for every linux install I reckon it would be far more than that. larry ellison 2nd boat level income.

This would be a good use case for government grants. The system to administer them is already there. It's beurocratic but it is free money that could support developers long term. It could probably be argued the DOE should offer funding due to the national security etc implications of open source maintenance.

Spot on, I mean who wants 6 year LTS support? Must be big old slow enterprises and possibly banks, government agencies, so pay up.

In practice, that would require those companies to pay for a distro like RedHat, who supports a lot of the kernel dev work.

But unfortunately everyone would rather find a way to get RH packages for free, and RH/IBM has only made the situation worse by alienating people.

aye. the second IBM took over it was clear it would be going to shit. it hasn't, totally, but im not loving the long-term direction

Windows is supported for 10 years if you upgrade on day one. No special support contract needed.

Good for them. With that kind of gumption I'm sure we'll see them running on a lot of devices, mars landers and practically the entire infrastructure of the internet in no time.

Mars Landers use VXWorks. Servers are definitely Linux.

To be fair some companies do maintain LTS kernels like Red Hat but they choose different kernel versions than upstream LTS and backport different things so it doesn’t have much crossover with these ones now.

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