Why kernel development still uses email (2016)
>, kernel developers still use email because it is faster than any of the alternatives. Over the course of the last year, the project accepted about eight changes per hour — every hour — from over 4,000 developers sponsored by over 400 companiesCompare with Google's ~1875-per-hour from 2015[1]:>, and Google’s 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits (changes) to the repository each day.Obviously, we can't extrapolate that Google should switch to an internal SMTP project management system layered on top of Perforce because "email is faster than any of the alternatives".  Same for other companies with high commit rates to their source repos like Microsoft and Facebook.Since Linus & Linux community never did an A-vs-B experiment of email vs open-source-JIRA-clone as a project workflow, I think we can only safely say that email works best for a disparate group of volunteers with different employers.  Email is the lowest common denominator that everyone could agree to use.You couldn't get 4000 opinionated developers to agree to use an open-source JIRA-clone or MS-Team-Foundation-clone or some other ALM[2]-in-the-cloud.Therefore, listing advantages of email clients such as "threaded tree views" etc is actually hiding the underlying reason email-as-workflow works for Linux.  Email isn't about "throughput"; it's "acceptance".[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_manageme...