My comment which I made on SVN's G+ page:

I'm not actually worried about the demographics in the sense of the Bitergia analysis. If you actually look at the number of newcomers showing up in each of the graphs (the 0-1 year bar), you'll see that it's generally growing, not shrinking. And of course over time some people will move on to other projects (example: Jeff Garzik was invited to the Kernel Summit before he started as a freshman at MIT, but he's now moved on to work on the bitcoin project). So you would expect that over time, the number of people in successive generations will start dropping off. So their analysis is actually quite sloppy as far as I'm concerned. If the total number of developers submitting patches is growing, and we have a constant supply of new people joining the project, it's all good.

Right now, the sense that I get is that companies are having problems finding high quality kernel developers. So people who are hobbyists and who demonstrate great skill tend not to stay hobbyists for very long; they will get hired, unless they have other reasons for staying put. (Example: if I had joined Red Hat or SuSE much earlier, before the IPO mania, instead of staying at MIT working on Kerberos and IPSEC and doing standards work for the IETF, and only doing Linux has a hobby until 1999, my financial situation today would probably be quite different; not that I'm complaining, mind you! The things that I got to work on while I was MIT was interesting, and I made a conscious choice to stay there.)

So to the extent that finding good engineers is hard for many companies, it's not surprising that we're trying to make sure we can attract new talent. That being said, those of us who were on the Kernel Summit program committee who decided that doing an explicit call for hobbyists did not consult with Amanda and Angela who decided to hold a Newcomer's reception. There was no grand plan; like many things in the Linux world, we have a decentralized command and control, and this was not the result of any kind of central planning. The senior engineers on the program committee, and the staff at the LF who have much greater contact with the executives at their member companies may have been reacting to similar observations about the job market for highly skilled developers, but we made our decisions on our own. So what you saw was emergent behavior; it wasn't an conscious decision by any one person to have an integrated campaign.

That being said, a bigger concern I have is not really the greying of the community, but what's our next challenge. We get the most innovation, and new developers (whether they be engineers employed by companies, or hobbyists) when we are responding to a new challenge. For example, for a while, we had a huge effort making Linux better for enterprise computing and enterprise servers. That tailed off, and then cloud computing and mobile/embedded Linux started taking off, and folks who had previously worked for HP and IBM have migrated to other companies, and there aren't as many people focused on making Linux better for enterprise servers. So the question is what's the next challenge?

What part of the I/T industry will Linux be disrupting next? What interesting technical problems will there be for us to tackle as engineers? What business opportunities will cause companies to increase their investment in Linux, and thus hire engineers to work on improving Linux so they can make a healthy return on their investment? What new set of companies will be the next generation of platinum sponsors for the Linux Foundation?

The opportunity to make Linux better-suited for the cloud and mobile/embedded computing won't last forever. So long as we can find that next opportunity, I'm really not worried about the health of the Linux kernel development community. We will continue to have technically interesting challenges, which will keep the hobbyists and as well as professional engineers engaged; and there will be opportunities to make money, which will keep companies continuing to invest in Linux, and people like me employed. :-)﻿