New blood and the kernel sound like a great combination for problems.
There are many more kinds of errors that people could make besides memory errors. Linux powers a good portion of the world, the vetting of kernel contributors should be done accordingly and the processes put in place should be strong enough that even if 'young and new blood' makes contributions that these are reviewed with a keen eye to all the lessons learned over the years, something those new and young people will still need to do.
I'm all for including newcomers into important open source projects but the kernel is the one place where I would expect some experience to be a requirement before contributing simply to avoid overloading the people further up the chain with a stream of obvious errors.
You are mostly correct, there's no real barrier to just anyone submitting a patch. However, the kernel does have a rule against anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, mainly for licensing clarity reasons (not that you need to submit any form of proof of identity).
And it was not used anywhere. And the code was 1/1000 the size of what it is now. Today it runs business critical operations across the entire globe. It is not the same situation as in 1991.
Yes, and nobody cared about whether it was released in one piece or not. And there was plenty wrong with those initial releases, especially compared to what was already out there.
Linux is now mission critical, which means the rules of 1991 no longer apply.
There are many more kinds of errors that people could make besides memory errors. Linux powers a good portion of the world, the vetting of kernel contributors should be done accordingly and the processes put in place should be strong enough that even if 'young and new blood' makes contributions that these are reviewed with a keen eye to all the lessons learned over the years, something those new and young people will still need to do.
I'm all for including newcomers into important open source projects but the kernel is the one place where I would expect some experience to be a requirement before contributing simply to avoid overloading the people further up the chain with a stream of obvious errors.