Ted Ts’o, in collaboration with the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory
Board, has put together a document called the Linux kernel
contribution maturity model to help companies improve their
participation in the kernel development process.

The goal is to encourage, in a management-friendly way, companies
to allow their engineers to contribute with the upstream Linux
Kernel development community, so we can grow the “talent pipeline”
for contributors to become respected leaders, and eventually kernel
maintainers.

Source: LWN.net – The Linux kernel contribution maturity model