My interactions have not been so negative. In particular Greg Kroah-Hartman is a saint for helping me get acquainted with kernel development by providing very p

My interactions have not been so negative. In particular Greg Kroah-Hartman is a saint for helping me get acquainted with kernel development by providing very patient feedback as I contributed a series of patches. Other maintainers have been similarly responsive, though the tone is typically "very technical feedback from a busy person" rather than new-developer-relations. These people receive patches of random quality, often from one-shot contributions. Triage of the patch stream must be pretty exhausting. I completely understand why people want their name on a kernel patch - it's pretty cool and a good thing to have on a resume - but at the same time, the bar for contributing is quite high and I think the dev process should not optimize for newbie contributors.