Linux’s renowned figure, Linus Torvalds, claims that although there have been consistent deductions about burnout in the open source software development realm, Linux continues to thrive. He believes that the unique scale and scope of his project set it apart.
During a conversation with Verizon’s open source chief Dirk Hohndel at the Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, Torvalds addressed a recurring issue in the Linux world and beyond—an aging developer community prone to burnout.
“It is absolutely true that kernel maintainers are aging, but there is a positive spin on that,” Torvalds commented. “Many open source projects don’t have maintainers who have been in it for over thirty years. It’s quite rare. So, while it’s true that developers do burn out and move on, which is usual, what’s unusual, and perhaps a good sign, is that some people stay engaged for decades.”
Historically a C-centric kernel, Linux launched official support for Rust in 2022, a robust, open-source programming language popular among leading technology firms. Recently, the head of the Rust for Linux project, Wedson Almeida Filho, stepped down after nearly four years, citing a drain in energy and enthusiasm to tackle the project’s non-technical challenges.
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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