Looking through this, it's not immediately clear how these are meant to be used. It seems like this is less about the maturity level from the community's side,

Looking through this, it's not immediately clear how these are meant to be used. It seems like this is less about the maturity level from the community's side, and more about what a company might put in their job description / evaluation / promotion model. Does that seem right? [EDIT] Yes; from the linked article: "Greg Kroah-Hartman said that the only way for developers to be able to work as maintainers within companies is for it to be a part of their job — something they will be evaluated on at the end of the year. This has to come from the top down, he said. Airlie answered, though, that maintainership can come from the bottom up as well; the DRM subsystem has a group review structure that requires developers to help review code. When the need arises, that makes it easy to pull developers up into maintainer roles. Chris Mason said that, at Facebook, maintainership is in the job description, and the company has had good success with that. "Ts'o concluded the session by suggesting that this might be a topic for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board to consider; perhaps the board could draw up a set of recommendations for companies." [1] [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/870581/ https://lwn.net/Articles/870581/