Mostly nontechnical person here: how much active maintenance does this driver need? To the uninitiated, it sounds like it should be basic and standard.
Not much, but it does need to be maintained. Every time someone pushes an update to code that the driver uses, something changes in the Linux kernel, or Intel releases be hardware that needs a different register map or whatever, the driver will fail. If nobody steps up to maintain it, it could stop working in a matter of months.
Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.
Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”
Mostly nontechnical person here: how much active maintenance does this driver need? To the uninitiated, it sounds like it should be basic and standard.
Not much, but it does need to be maintained. Every time someone pushes an update to code that the driver uses, something changes in the Linux kernel, or Intel releases be hardware that needs a different register map or whatever, the driver will fail. If nobody steps up to maintain it, it could stop working in a matter of months.
Okay, thanks!
This doesn’t sound like a 40-hour per week kind of a job
Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.
Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”
I doubt maintaining a single deriver was their only responsibility.