> The other big problem is the burnout from maintainers, which are often unpaid and could use a lot more support from the billion-dollar companies that benefit from using Linux.
This is the crux of the issue: putting the maintenance burden on unpaid volunteers instead of having the burden be carried by the companies that profit from the 6-year LTS.
Canonical volunteered to maintain LTS kernels within the community, but upstream refuses to accept Canonical's contributions - ironically because apparently they "don't work within the community". Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/608917/
Disclosure: I work for Canonical. I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical, expressed opinions here are my own. [Edit: I should add that I don't work on the kernel so I feel like I'm as much an outside observer as you probably are]. But I'm not sure I'm even expressing an opinion here - just citing some relevant, publicly verifiable facts.
Minor thing, if you look at the citation it says that they don't want to hand over official control of official branches to Canonical because they don't trust them to engage with the community, with those citations OP must have meant "accept contributions" as "accept canonical being in control of older official kernel branches to decide what patches are accept (even though no one else will)" rather than they are not accepting patches from canonical.
I'm just going by the article I cited. I don't know any more than the reason given there. And come on: how is refusing contributions when the cited reason is not contributing not ironic?
The Linux Foundation "harvests" a couple hundred million dollars a year [1]. They could easily spend more on maintainers. I can't easily find exact number, but Torvalds is paid between 1-2 million dollars a year by The Linux Foundation. They could support other volunteer maintainers as well.
This would be a good use case for government grants. The system to administer them is already there. It's beurocratic but it is free money that could support developers long term. It could probably be argued the DOE should offer funding due to the national security etc implications of open source maintenance.
Good for them. With that kind of gumption I'm sure we'll see them running on a lot of devices, mars landers and practically the entire infrastructure of the internet in no time.
To be fair some companies do maintain LTS kernels like Red Hat but they choose different kernel versions than upstream LTS and backport different things so it doesn’t have much crossover with these ones now.
This is the crux of the issue: putting the maintenance burden on unpaid volunteers instead of having the burden be carried by the companies that profit from the 6-year LTS.