Speaking for myself, this is partly why I want to contribute to the kernel.

I tend not to take my own mistakes very seriously unless they come with serious consequences. Having someone I respect tear into me would, I think, force me to take greater care and apply more attention to my work than I already do.

I've heard similar anecdotes from people who have contributed. I even recall a female contributor say something positive about it.

Then you're needlessly limiting yourself, as you'd very unlikely run into any verbal abuse.

If anything you'd have trouble getting code in because maintainer thinks it would add more complexity than is necessary, or would make his job harder in the future, or after writing and testing the code, you'd find out you should have been doing things differently, etc. These are much more probable ways to get discouraged from contributing kernel code.

There's a high bar to getting code in, and that can be frustrating. But it also keeps the mainline attractive to users and developers, because of ever improving code quality.

I'd be absolutely terrified to submit a patch, ever.

"What the fuck is this? This came from Satan's butt-hole. Kill whoever did this - kill them immediately, here, I'll go and find this asshole who submitted this patch, and do it for you, you lazy ingrates, why do I have to do everything around here?"

This isn't some lone beginner trying to help improve Linux, this is a billion dollar company with decades of experience trying to cover their own ass. Judging by Linus' thousands of emails on the mailing lists, any reply you got would be polite and helpful.

So, how likely do you think Linus is to look past the fact that I work for Google? It doesn't make me any less of a beginner in the space. :P

If Google were making you upload the patches to fix some huge problem in every Chromebook, you wouldn't get the beginners treatment. If it was some universal bug fix or optimization I doubt the Google connection would matter.