Comment Poor introduction of open source world to students (Score 1) 742
The first reason it seems to be "the geeky look and feel" of open source world, which stops them to communicate with the community project. See all these mailing lists - if any noob asks some basic question, how he would be treated? we know.... The projection of vi and emacs as the only editors to do all these stuff... rude behaviour of many geeks keep the young programmers away... there is no updated docs on kernel tree... In this scenario, if a young programmer is interested in kernel dev, it is great - he is **really** interested to hard core stuff - may be the geek's world consider all these as entrance test to kernel dev
Second reason could be market value. I have supported a few college projects. IMHO the most students don't want to work in a project which does **not have any job market value** compared to VC++,
Third reason could be development tools. The above mentioned students were very much interested in VB
Though I am not a kernel programmer, occasionally I make my hands dirty... I hacked a modem driver to make my ISP provided modem to work in linux - it was around 10 years before - this was my first kernel look - I didn't get any materials to guide on code... just hours and hours of debugging, at last got it done. That is the reason when it was happened to dig through a network card driver, I just documented it for beginners (like me) like this http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2006/07/31/linux-ethernet-network-device-driver-a-flow-of-code/. This kind of simple overview documents should be enough all modules in kernel will be more helpful for young developers.