Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix
Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix
The future of Foss is in corporate time donations for projects that are useful for them. Open software collaboration is one hell of an efficiency gain. Whenever me or my colleagues have dead time I ask them to work on improving open source projects. It's just a few days every few months but it adds up. Also we like to fix bugs in Foss software that affects our customers as we usually fix and upstream them and can bill that to the customer. So the company gets played, the worker gets payed and open source gets funding. No more sole maintainers for life that don't have money to heat their homes because nobody donates. :)
Perhaps not relevant to the conversation, but if you use and enjoy any FOSS product, donate money to the maintainers when you can
They were doing this all by themselves?!
Well, "maintainer" is usually a single person job. They didn't write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it's not great nobody is stepping up, but it's also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux's wifi support single handed, either.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
There's lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there's just no "lead maintainer" now
The article isn't entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I'd expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.
That explains many things
What is up with all the maintainers stepping down lately?
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.
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.
A number of them have written about their reasons- I can't speak for the maintainer this article is about but the general sentiment I've seen from the ones I've been hearing about is that the culture around kernel development is dogwater. Lots of it surrounding refusal to make any space for R4L and shitting on devs working on it, but then also spinning out of that are maintainers likening their quality control responsibilities to being "the thin blue line".
Ethernet cable intensifies
I hope they invent wireless ethernet
Maybe we can put it on the open 2.4GHz spectrum and encrypt it with RC4.
Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol. It can run on many different mediums and cable types.
But can it run over wet string, though?
WiFi is a fad anyways.
WiMax gang rise up
I need to get some Meshtastic modules...
If you can't bite it, it doesn't exist.
Weird that’s what my girlfriend says.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/youngsters_in_foss/
Read this a few days ago and it feels pretty relevant here.
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.
Is it the new cool thing for Linux maintainers to step down?
Third time I’ve seen it recently…
It's demographics. Linux contributors & maintainers skew heavily to the older end of the spectrum (and, although not relevant to this point, also skew heavily male).
People who can contribute time to a project for free tend to be older because they are financially and career settled by the time they hit 50s. Raising a family tends not to leave a lot of spare time.
Bingo.
Contributing and/or maintaining a FOSS project < not getting murdered by my wife for "playing on my computer instead of spending time with my family."
It could be some of the most mission-critical work imaginable, but she'd still see it as goofing around because I'm not getting paid, and she requires attention. And I love the hell out of my wife, so happy wife indeed equals happy life.
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.
Great! FreeBSD needs help with WiFi!
And this is how I see Linux quickly unravelling and planned insecurities creeping in over the next decade or so.
Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up. In fact, they already have started adjusting.
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.
You're being dramatic, the world will collapse before this becomes a problem
I always say the doom of humanity won’t be wars or something sudden. It’ll be something that’s been silently happening: the extinction of species and ecosystems one by one that’s been accelerating in the last 50 years. And now with global warming, it’ll only get worse because environments are changing and forcing species out of their homes.
And this is something I don’t see getting better at all. Social media just seems to have made people even more egocentric and selfish and actionless too, because ranting about problems online makes people feel like they did their part.
We’ll just witness the world falling apart one disaster after another and watch it as “entertainment” on TikTok and Reels, until it’s our turn.
how so?
I would've figured there were multiple standards and such requiring multiple drivers and maintainers, nonetheless manufacturers doing it themselves.
One maintainer, multiple supported devices
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.
So two thousands and ten eleven
twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twentyone twentytwo twentythree twentyfour twentyfivetwentynine is the year of Linux on desktop!I used to daily drive Ubuntu some years ago for work/personal use but have been back on Win 10 primarily for the last 4-5 years. I was considering trying to go back due to how much Windows sucks (despite some proprietary software only being available on it) but remembering the trouble I had with some networking/printer drivers and troubleshooting those issues and then seeing this article Is definitely making me reconsider..
I haven't seen Wireless driver issues in years. Any non arcane devices have drivers and most distros enable most of them in their kernel.
Wireless drivers are in a lot better state than they used to be, printer drivers are very dependent on the brand you have.
IME (YMMV) Brother printers seem to consistently work quite well and Epson printers seem to consistently be shit.
They have already adjusted the team.
It astounds me that people who support linux get personally offended if you say you're not sure linux is for you.
I watched a video where a guy installed linux, and then installed a new desktop environment that caters to touchscreen. He got a bunch of errors. So he said "Ah, that's alright! I'll just bring up terminal"
And then he types
sudo add do willywop bojanga -l -r ♧¿¤☆▪︎●
And I'm like "ok, hold on. How the fuck does he just KNOW that exact string is what will fix it???"
If you don't speak terminal, that shits confusing as hell.
And now this story is like smokey the bear. "Only YOU can maintain wifi protocols. Seriously. I'm done. It's just you now. The professionals are sick of this shit."
So it's reasonable that non-techies are like "I had some issues before, but now I'll have MORE issues if I comd back.....I better stick with what I kjow works."
Meanwhile lemmy users are like "BOOO WINDOWS!!!! BOOOO I SAY!!! WHY DON'T YOU JUST UNDERSTAND THE THINGS YOU DON'T GET???"
And thus.....you have downvotes for saying logically reasonable things that piss off obsessive types who would downvote each other over which distro is best.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to say, the reason the terminal is helpful in these types of scenarios is never communicated properly in my opinion.
The reason when you ask people for help or Google stuff and get terminal commands back is because they are clear, concise, and reproducible. It's really hard from the perspective of the people helping, to communicate, usually over text, how to navigate UIs that are ever changing and change depending on the users hardware and setup. This is true for windows too, and it's why getting any help beyond very simple troubleshooting will devolve into powershell commands.
As for this scenario, it's just inflammatory on purpose, would anyone mention or care if one person at Microsoft who was a project lead retired after decades of working? There are literally thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, this is just one of them retiring. A maintainer is only one role in a project and can (and will) very easily be replaced. If not by a volunteer, then in a paid position from one of the many companies that pay developers to maintain the Linux kernel. Regardless, there is already people maintaining the the ath10k, ath11k, and ath12k drivers. This is really just a non issue of a temporary vacancy for one position, the same thing that happens at every single software organization every day.
