Software longevity is something that I have bene thinking about for a little bit.

At $dayjob, we use Openstack, an open source cloud infrastructure project.

It's a pretty complicated set of projects that interact to each other in order to provide multi-tenancy for virtual machines at scale.

It was initially all the rage, before the cloud starting really picking up steam.

So now, you have a massive project that is slowly losing traction, but also relying on that notoriety to gain developers.

So, I think Linus point is quite valid. These small, low risk, low value patches are essential in having a healthy community around a product.

They help easing your way into a codebase, developpement flow and all the other idiosyncrasies of established tech circles.