In an interview with ZDNet Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, talks about the adversities of becoming a Linux kernel developer. Among other things, he advises new contributors to “start small” by sending “trivial patches”.
“It’s definitely not easy to become a ‘big contributor’,” wrote Torvalds. “For one thing, the kernel is quite complex and big, and it inevitably simply takes time to learn all the rules — not just for the code, but for how the whole development environment works. Similarly, for a new developer, it will take time before people start recognising the name and start trusting the developer to do the right things.”
However, Torvalds argued that Linux kernel processes do make it easy to contribute small patches.
“[We] make it fairly easy for people to ease into kernel development,” wrote Torvalds. “It seems to be working too. We literally have thousands of people with patches attributed to them in each release.”
