The future of Foss is in corporate time donations for projects that are useful for them. Open software collaboration is one hell of an efficiency gain. Whenever me or my colleagues have dead time I ask them to work on improving open source projects. It's just a few days every few months but it adds up. Also we like to fix bugs in Foss software that affects our customers as we usually fix and upstream them and can bill that to the customer. So the company gets played, the worker gets payed and open source gets funding. No more sole maintainers for life that don't have money to heat their homes because nobody donates. :)
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Perhaps not relevant to the conversation, but if you use and enjoy any FOSS product, donate money to the maintainers when you can
They were doing this all by themselves?!
Well, "maintainer" is usually a single person job. They didn't write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it's not great nobody is stepping up, but it's also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux's wifi support single handed, either.
Other people stepped up like within a day.
That's great! Any idea who?
Where did you read that? I only saw Johannes Berg saying he couldn't maintain that stack too, after three days.
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Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Btw, you can embedd the image like that:
It will look like that:
Oddly xkcd's image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Unless you get one of the day's 10'000, it'll be recognised by any tech people.
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There's lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there's just no "lead maintainer" now
The article isn't entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I'd expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.
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I'd like it if Valve steps up to do the job. They're making hardware that needs WiFi, might as well go all in.
Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon. 😕
Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Steve burned out a long time ago after all the free work he did on top of his day job.
It's better if the titular Steve isn't from US. Right now at least.
Unfortunately, relying on individuals is what caused the problen in the first place.
Did you try asking Steve? He won’t return my calls
And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
What is up with all the maintainers stepping down lately?
Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.
And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.
This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.
Note that this isn't exclusive to FOSS, but it's just more transparent.
Over the last decade I've seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.
But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn't mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.
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A number of them have written about their reasons- I can't speak for the maintainer this article is about but the general sentiment I've seen from the ones I've been hearing about is that the culture around kernel development is dogwater. Lots of it surrounding refusal to make any space for R4L and shitting on devs working on it, but then also spinning out of that are maintainers likening their quality control responsibilities to being "the thin blue line".
I mean, probably someone at qualcomm will likely take his place? They need drivers for themselves anyway and will probably continue providing them. I have no idea who the contributors of similar drivers are but I'd imagine Intel makes drivers for their wifi chips themselves and contributes them to the kernel since they count as one of the biggest contributors.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/youngsters_in_foss/
Read this a few days ago and it feels pretty relevant here.
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