Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix
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I'd like it if Valve steps up to do the job. They're making hardware that needs WiFi, might as well go all in.
Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
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Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.
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Perhaps not relevant to the conversation, but if you use and enjoy any FOSS product, donate money to the maintainers when you can
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The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.
Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
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Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Did you try asking Steve? He won’t return my calls
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Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Unfortunately, relying on individuals is what caused the problen in the first place.
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I mean, probably someone at qualcomm will likely take his place? They need drivers for themselves anyway and will probably continue providing them. I have no idea who the contributors of similar drivers are but I'd imagine Intel makes drivers for their wifi chips themselves and contributes them to the kernel since they count as one of the biggest contributors.
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Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
It's better if the titular Steve isn't from US. Right now at least.
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Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Steve burned out a long time ago after all the free work he did on top of his day job.
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The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.
And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
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Oddly xkcd's image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Post in addition to the link.
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Just shut it all down, Nebraska guy. The world doesn’t appreciate you.
Seems like nowadays Nebraska guy is more likely to be a rabid Trump supporter who likes the way things have been so far in 2025. 🤮
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Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up.
These things happen periodically.
It turns out people switch jobs, retire, or just burn out. Other maintainers can cover while they select a new one.
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Make linux your wife and then everyone will be happy.
Except OP.
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Yeah but the issue with the guy leading Asahi Linux, which is probably the other one mentioned, has nothing to do with him being old.
That also happens. I'm honestly surprised they lasted that long, doing any OS work on Apple hardware sucks. You have a small user base and an even smaller contributor base, poor documentation, and zero support from the manufacturer. It's the perfect storm of headwinds.
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Other people stepped up like within a day.
That's great! Any idea who?
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Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.
And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.
This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.
It's gotta change to true community, where we lift each other up, looking to the future, readying others to take our mantle when we retire. That's the only way FOSS will thrive and have a chance to compete with corpos.
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Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.
And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.
This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.
Note that this isn't exclusive to FOSS, but it's just more transparent.
Over the last decade I've seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.
But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn't mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.
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Other people stepped up like within a day.
Where did you read that? I only saw Johannes Berg saying he couldn't maintain that stack too, after three days.
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I would've figured there were multiple standards and such requiring multiple drivers and maintainers, nonetheless manufacturers doing it themselves.
You're right that there are many drivers and people from manufacturers responsible for hardware families, but there still needs to be a maintainer for the subsystem as a whole.
That person reviews what the manufacturers and other contributors send in, to validate that things are still compatible where they touch in the kernel, and that the code is good enough. They then prep the commits of the subsystem for inclusion into the next kernel version and pass that to Linus, is my understanding.
