That’s because the problem is hard and deep, and most open source contributors work for free and are shallow, working to satisfy their egos and need for intellectual stimulation. Paid expertise is needed here.

Imagine if all doctors and surgeons were volunteers; that’s the situation you have now with a lot of OSS.

Given the large majority of commits to the Linux kernel are done by people employed by companies to work on it, your starting premise couldn't be further from the truth, let alone the conclusions you draw from it.

Given that they said most open source contributors I think they are right. Most contributors are not contributing to the Linux kernel. Most are contributing to (https://githut.info/) JavaScript packages

I think that's being somewhat generous of an interpretation given the thread of the conversation, which is specifically about drivers. For it to be talking about Open Source developers in general would be a serious pivot.

For a version of GitHut that goes beyond 2014: https://madnight.github.io/githut/

Is any company employing people to work on touchpad drivers, though?

Bus factor is irrelevant.

It's a concept that basically boils down to "people would not be smart enough to understand the code unaided". This is plainly wrong. I speak from experience of diving into some horrible code base.

It also assumes that reproducing the functionality from scratch would be hard. Looking at all the reimplementations of A where A is one of unix, X, web browser, network stack, SQL database and other complex techno, it is also clearly not true.

My point here was that it's really easy to complain about the touchpad driver but it takes a lot more effort to actually go and write the code. There was some effort last year: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wbharding/libinput/-/commits/...

I also don't see bus factor the same way you do. People can be smart enough to understand the code, but unless someone actually goes and actively takes up code maintenance the project will slowly fade and disappear (for example the synaptics driver that libinput replaced https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-input-synaptics/com...).

Disagree. Learning a codebase from scratch is tricky; it's better if you have someone to teach you. So if the one contributor gets bus'd, then it'll take time (=money) to get up to speed.

I wonder if any of the commercial distro developers care enough about Linux on the desktop to fix this. Or, does Chromium OS use libinput? If so, then Google could fix this.