>>106563459 (OP)
It's still the most widely used OS kernel in the world, between Android and the server marketshare. And you can contribute to making it better. Or you can get a job at Google and get paid to add stuff they tell you to add to it - for instance we can thank Google for ext4's per-file encryption feature, because they wanted device encryption and private folders that aren't fixed size like dm-crypt, and didn't want to run a more complex filesystem like btrfs just for the one feature.