Tux Machines

Linux Firewire Support and Old Developers in Charge

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 23, 2024

Tom's Hardware ☛ Firewire refuses to die, but needs help — as hardware becomes rarer, maintainer seeks volunteers for device testing

The Linux OS Firewire Maintainer is looking for help from testers still using the ancient hardware. Takashi Sakamoto has made it his quest to keep Firewire (IEEE 1394) support going on Linux systems until 2029. However, with such hardware use increasingly rare, he is looking for more input from the user base.

TechCrunch ☛ Linus Torvalds explains why aging Linux developers are a good thing

Linux’s luminary linchpin, Linus Torvalds, says that despite longstanding reports of burnout in the open source software development realm, Linux is as strong as ever — though he acknowledges his project is perhaps something of an outlier due to its scale and scope.

Speaking to Verizon’s head of open source Dirk Hohndel at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna on Monday, Torvalds tackled a topic that has frequently reared its head in the Linux world and beyond: an aging developer community prone to burnout.

“It is absolutely true that [Linux] kernel maintainers are aging, but there is a positive spin on that,” Torvalds said. “How many [open source] projects have maintainers that have literally been around for over three decades? It is very unusual. So when people say, ‘developers burn out and go away’ — yes, that’s true, but that’s kind of normal. What is not normal is that people actually stay around for decades, that’s the unusual thing, and I think that’s to some degree a good sign.”