Being an upstream maintainer is incredibly under-appreciated. It’s an unfathomably hard, and somewhat thankless, job (at least if you do it well). A friend of mine was in a cab with Ted Ts’o at a conference and he was reviewing patches on his phone to keep up with the workload (or maybe he was bored who knows).

Despite incredible effort from maintainers, getting necessary changes into Linux can take forever. In the subsystem I depend on (and occasionally contribute to directly) it’s kinda assumed it will take at least a year (probably two) for any substantial project to get merged. This continuously disappoints PMs and Leadership. A lot of people, understandably, chafe against this lack of agility.

OTOH, I’ve been on the other side of kernel bugs. Most recently, a memory arithmetic bug was causing corruption, and took my team at least an engineer year to track down. This makes me quite sympathetic to maintainers demands for quality.

I’ve also been on the other side of the calibration discussions where Open Source work goes under appreciated. The irony never stops (“They won’t merge our patches!” “Are you having your engineers review theirs?”). That and the raw pipeline issues for maintainers (it takes a lot of experience to be a maintainer, which implies spending a lot of a bright engineer’s time on reviewing and contributing upstream to things unrelated to immediate priorities).