Interestingly I heard that the Java people at Google rail against using Python for large projects because they supposedly get out of hand..

What does it mean for a project to "get out of hand" in this context?

Java starts off out of hand, and just gets worse when things like Guice are thrown into the mix.

Sounds like Martijn doesn't actually know much about Linux kernel development.

Patches get rejected from the kernel all the time for many of the same reasons listed in the linked post. It takes a long time for most new kernel contributors to get anything substantive in, and major changes almost never go in without huge reviews, fights, competing proposals, etc..

The only difference between that and what this post talked about is that for the kernel, a lot of the sausage making goes on in public (though far from all of it).

I actually think Martijn does understand that many patches will still get rejected - but he would like to still see some community contributions getting in (as opposed to the current message of 'stop contributing').

I personally think that a project with source available under an OSI Licene but no effort to respond to or build a community is not really an open source project.

But the Linux community does a pretty good job of describing how to submit good patches. The kernel sources include README files for SubmittingPatches and CodingStyle (and scripts for checking patch style).