Hard work and poor pay stresses out open-source maintainers
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Linux and Open Source | June 3, 2021 -- 20:57 GMT (13:57 PDT) | Topic: Enterprise Software
Recently, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, blocked University of Minnesota developers from submitting any Linux patches because several had deliberately tried to introduce bad patches. That was bad enough, but besides the security aspects, Kroah-Hartman also pointed out that code maintainers "have enough real work to do" without wasting time on finding and smacking down deliberately bad code. That's for sure.
That's because the job of being an open-source maintainer is a hard one. While developers fix bugs and create features and reviewers look over their code, the code buck stops with the maintainer. They're responsible for the ongoing work across broad swatches of an open-source project. As you might guess there are more developers than reviewers and more reviewers than maintainers. Maintainers are the conductors of an open-source project orchestra. If a bug hasn't been fixed by a developer, they'll fix it. If the code hasn't been reviewed they'll review it. And, with large projects like Linux, there are often hundreds of code patches, which need to be maintained a week.
