Another Longtime Linux Developer Looks To Distance Himself From The Kernel Community

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 6 October 2015 at 10:30 AM EDT. 73 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
A day after Sarah Sharp formally announced she's stepping away from Linux kernel development due to the arguably toxic community, well known kernel developer Matthew Garrett announced he too is planning to cease his personal contributions to the upstream Linux kernel.

Matthew Garrett, who is well known for his Linux kernel work on UEFI/SecureBoot and power management, among other areas over the years, is fed up with the behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list too.

He wrote a few minutes ago on his personal blog, "In the end it's a mixture of just being tired of dealing with the crap associated with Linux development and realising that by continuing to put up with it I'm tacitly encouraging its continuation, but I can't be bothered any more. And, thanks to the magic of free software, it turns out that I can avoid putting up with the bullshit in the kernel community and get to work on the things I'm interested in doing...But, until there's a significant shift in community norms on LKML, I'll only be there when I'm being paid to be there. And that's improved my mood immeasurably."

Currently he's maintaining his own kernel tree where he's been playing around with a BSD-style securelevel interface and other work. He's currently employed by CoreOS while also is a member of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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