Linux’s key figure, Linus Torvalds, has indicated that although there have been ongoing discussions of burnout within the open source software development community, Linux remains robust. He admits, however, his project may be unique due to its massive scale and impact.

During a conversation with Verizon’s open source chief Dirk Hohndel at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, Torvalds addressed a recurring concern within the Linux community and elsewhere about an aging developer base susceptible to burnout.

“It is certainly true that Linux kernel maintainers are getting older, but there’s a positive aspect to consider,” Torvalds remarked. “How many [open source] projects can boast that their maintainers have stayed on for more than thirty years? This is quite rare. When people talk about ‘developers burning out and leaving’—yes, that happens, but it’s quite ordinary. What’s extraordinary is that some have remained for decades. That, in itself, is promising.”

Traditionally centered around the C programming language, as of 2022, the Linux project introduced official support for Rust, a widely-supported open-source programming language. Recently, Rust for Linux project leader Wedson Almeida Filho announced his resignation after nearly four years due to a decline in his drive and enthusiasm for handling the project’s “non-technical nonsense.”

And back in January, senior Rust engineer Jynn Nelson also noted that the burnout problem is very real. “The number of people who have left the Rust project due to burnout is shockingly high,” Nelson wrote. “The number of people in the project who are close to burnout is also shockingly high.”

Linux is probably the most successful open-source project of all time, intersecting with everything from web servers and ATMs, to desktop and mobile operating systems. During these growth years, Torvalds has branched out and created the omnipresent version control system known as Git. But some 33 years on from Linux‘s inception, Torvalds remains the kernel’s central maintainer, with support from tens of thousands of contributors stemming from corporations reliant on Linux, as well as sources closer to home such as Linux Foundation fellow Greg Kroah-Kartman, who leads on the Linux kernel’s stable release.

“I think part of the issue with us having a lot of developers, is that we’ve always had a lot of people who are very competent and could step up,” Torvalds said. “Greg hasn’t always been Greg — before Greg, there were Andrews and Allens, and after Greg there will be Shannons and Steves. There are people who have been around for decades, and the real issue is that you have to have a person — or a group — that people in the development community can trust. And part of trust is fundamentally about having been around for ‘long enough’ that people know how you work.”

However, Torvalds acknowledged that such an ecosystem can be daunting and difficult for younger or less-experienced developers to enter, especially when they see incumbents that have been around so long. But despite that, there are newcomers who manage to make their way into the heart of the Linux project.

“We have core developers that are top-level maintainers for major subsystems, who have come up in just a few years,” Torvalds said. “It’s not instant, but there are new people who come in, and three years later they are a main developer. It is not impossible at all. I think we have a fairly healthy developer subsystem, but the whole monkey dance about developers, developers, developers… we’ve got them. The fact that we also have these old, ‘graying’ people around — I don’t see that as a huge problem.”

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