Hector Martin (Marcan42) was the lead developer of Asahi Linux, until he recently resigned. He had a Mastodon page where he would talk about AL development and hardware stuff, as well as frustrations dealing with kernel maintainers to upstream things like Rust stuff (long before the beef that went down this month).
Marcan has made it clear he needs a break, but I really wish he at least kept his Mastodon page up, perhaps in read-only. I’ll admit, I liked his posts so much I looked at it daily. I had a bookmark keyword in Firefox: I’d type tr in the URL bar to go to https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan.
I don’t think this is about specific people. It’s a systemic problem and about drama, burn-out and other issues. I mean if they break due to some larger issues, the issues don’t necessarily vanish along with the people… I mean it’s not 100% that way, either. Sometimes people-problems go away along with the involved people. But I don’t think this is about idolization. And I don’t even think it’s bad per se. I mean if someone maintains a complex thing for a long time, they have a lot of specific knowledge about the intricate details. And whether you idolize them or not… You can’t just replace them easily.
Very true, and that’s kinda the crux of my point. We should prepare for the inevitable loss of any person and not take them for granted. Whether through burnout, death, or whatever, most people won’t stick with the same project their whole life.
And so, somebody(s) should join those people such that they aren’t irreplaceable.
Hmmh. I mean sadly we don’t have an abundance of free software developers, let alone kernel developers. So in reality we just can’t take them from anywhere. More often than not, it’s hard enough to find one person. So I don’t see how we’d get a second one on standby. But I agree. hypothetically, it’d be nice to have more than enough people working on important software projects, and some leeway.
Perhaps it’s incumbent upon those visionaries to take time to train their replacement, rather than focus upon code.
In practice, that might be easier said than done, however.