For several years I did maintain a private kernel fork for my then-employer. I was not interested in contributing any of our work (mostly netfilter related) ba

For several years I did maintain a private kernel fork for my then-employer. I was not interested in contributing any of our work (mostly netfilter related) back to the core precisely because I have better things to do with my emotional energy than engage with the aggressively toxic personalities of LKML. That's one of the joys of open source, of course, doing your own thing. In contrast I had a much better experience contributing to Postfix and Dovecot, where the benevolent dictators did not feel the urge to spew pages of vitriol in response to a blunder when a neutrally worded admonishment would do.