Kernel Developer Banned for 9 Years and Counting

[Ben Francis]

It's been a while.

lOn 2014-04-02, Linus Torvalds banned kernel developer Kay Sievers from submitting code to the Linux kernel until he fixes his ways:

I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known
to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other
projects to fix their project. Because I am *not* willing to take
patches from people who don't clean up after their problems, and don't
admit that it's their problem to fix. 

The last accepted commit with Kay as the author is dated 2013-04-06 in the git log. He last reported a bug in 2016. He is still copied on commits as late as April 2023.

Linus's hard and fast rule is to never break userland, lest your head be put on a spike outside the castle.

It's too bad. Kay was prolific from 2005 to 2013, authoring 360 commits in those 9 years. Lennart Poettering, his partner in developing Systemd and who now works at Microsoft, had 31 commits by comparison.

Ben