“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
This is something OSS projects everywhere are dealing with, no matter what their previous policies were nor what their personal beliefs about LLMs are.
I can’t believe people here are acting like Linus and Linux “brought this on themselves.” Vibecoding spammers do not care about a project’s guidelines, nor their maintainers’ workload; they’re coming either way. And friction + stricter contribution standards are how other projects are dealing with this, too.