Recently The Register published an interview with Microsoft's Sarah Novotny where she claimed that the Linux kernel project's reliance on plain-text email was a barrier to entry for new kernel developers.
Predictably a bunch of folks showed up on Twitter to heap abuse and gatekeep people's email clients, and just as predictably a lot of well-meaning folks took the opposing side that because those people were jerks, that Novotny was right. So I want to talk about both why the structure of these kinds of arguments is such a disaster and why I agree with Novotny's stated goals but think that she doesn't have much of a solution to the problem.
Let's address the jerks first because they're the least interesting bit. Novotny's stated goals as Microsoft's representative to the Linux Foundation board are to ensure the long term survival of the Linux kernel project and in particular to ensure there's a flow of new maintainers to the project. It should follow without question that for there to be new maintainers, there needs to be a flow of new contributors who eventually become experience contributors who can take over from the old maintainers as they literally age-out of working on the kernel full time. I can't think of any possible good-faith argument against this goal, because it's rooted in the reality that kernel developers are mortal.
I'm also going to put some words into Novotny's mouth here (in a friendly sense) and suggest that in referring "developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years" she's also looking to expand the demographics of the kernel project contributors. That's a worthy goal!
But whether or not she intended to imply that, I suspect that many of the gatekeeping types think she implied it. This is what sets up the Twitter shitposting, because you have a very noisy group of people who long-ago staked ground that they want tech to be the domain of cranky white cis dudes (optionally with beards) and will jump at the opportunity to fight about it. I find these people super frustrating both because they're awful and because they suck all the air out of the room from what could otherwise be adult conversations about the best tactics. Unfortunately a lot of very smart and empathetic people that I like get suckered into engaging in that conversation. You can't reach these people, only freeze them out. (And hope that eventually they'll do some work on themselves and be ready to join a culture that is happy to embrace them again, but I'm admittedly cynical about that.)
The second set of arguments you can have here is that Novotny is not a disinterested party. She works for Microsoft, and previously worked at Google. Both of these organizations have reputations for open source malfeasance and those reputations are going to be reflected onto anything she says.
If you read the interview carefully, you'll find that Novotny is talking in fairly broad strokes without really recommending anything in particular. (This probably contributes to the focus of the discussion on plain-text email and not maintainer succession) So if you think that the reputation of Microsoft is well-deserved, you're not likely to read between those lines in a way that assumes good intent. Instead, it vaguely smells like another nefarious attempt at "embrace, extend, extinguish".
A similar example might be if Linux Torvalds has something excitable but borderline to say on the LKML. Because of his reputation as being an asshole, if you're inclined to see him as a jerk you'll read what he says uncharitably. Whereas if you're inclined to believe he's trying to do the work of self-improvement, you may read it more generously as enthusiastically penetrating questions to a colleague he respects.
Novotny's playing coy about hosting kernel development on GitHub probably works against her here. We all know that's what we're talking about, because there are no technically feasible alternatives for a project of that scale. (Sorry GitLab.)
In any case, while I'm not particularly inclined to see Microsoft in a good light, in this case I don't see much to be paranoid about. While I'm sure GitHub would love the reputational boost of hosting kernel development, this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. It wouldn't give Microsoft special control over the project that it doesn't already have by its funding, board position, and many development contributions.
If we get rid of misaligned goals or accusations of bad faith, that leaves us with a discussion of tactics. This is where I suspect Novotny's background at Google is influencing her to try to apply a tooling fix to a cultural problem.
Which is to say, git-send-email is not the problem here.
Daniel Vetter's 2017 post Why Github can't host the Linux Kernel Community does a good job summarizing the distributed structure of the kernel development project:
No one (except Linus himself) is developing stuff on top of Linus’ repository. Every subsystem, and often even big drivers, have their own git repositories, with their own mailing lists to track submissions and discuss issues completely separate from everyone else.
...
But looking closer, it’s very, very far away from a single git repository. Just looking at the upstream subsystem and driver repositories gives you a few hundred. If you look at the entire ecosystem, including hardware vendors, distributions, other linux-based OS and individual products, you easily have a few thousand major repositories, and many, many more in total.
As skilled as the kernel developers may be, nobody escapes Conway's Law. The systems they have developed, including git itself, are reflections of the organization that created them.
The kernel is not developed in the same way that Kubernetes is, because it's not organized the same way. Kubernetes is largely run by many committees ("SIGs"), befitting its origin as a corporate controlled project. While Linux is developed largely via the contributions of these same corporations, the technical governance structure is one of distributed hierarchies.
Someone looking to contribute to the kernel needs to understand the
kernel subsystem in question. They need to write professional-grade
C. They need to use the notoriously user-hostile git source control
software. Given those heady requirements, I suspect that plain-text
email is not the barrier to entry that Novotny thinks it is. And
certainly compared to understanding the sprawling organization of the
project it seems like a tiny one.
Search for "getting into linux kernel development" and the best page you find is the kernel.org page that gets you started with... kbuild, email patches, and coding style? A less narrow search found the development process page which is better, but not exactly a welcome mat.
This isn't a tooling problem, it's one of human communication. And what I find especially frustrating about a focus on tooling is that Novotny's employer is one of those uniquely positioned to contribute to fixing the human problems.
The huge corporate contributors like Microsoft, Google, and RedHat should be building on-ramps to kernel development. They should be producing on-boarding documentation, guides to how the project is structured, and providing mentorship (and sponsorship!) for new kernel developers. They should be ensuring that their own pipeline of kernel contributors is diverse and that the contributors they employ are building an inclusive culture within the LKML and other project spaces. And they should be holding each other accountable for doing the same.
Telling El Reg the issue is plain text email only distracts from solving the real problems.