“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
Yes, the man by far most responsible for a semblance of OS choice today is the real problem here because he tries to think objectively and avoid premature overreactions. Maybe you’d prefer an OS kernel that runs on outrage. Like every PR could be voted on in social media and the most upvoted gets merged and the least upvoted get posted on a wall of shame where the contributors are mercilessly mocked? Who needs decades of experience when you’ve skimmed some headlines that either confirm or deny your own worldview.