This happened to me as well. Didn't get any response to my patch, resent it and got told it had "already been fixed". Sure enough, a worse (IMHO) fix was in, fixing this thing that had never worked in the kernel. They didn't even tell me.

The Linux kernel gets away with this because it's the biggest/most important software project in the world.

When I had a similar experience with another open source project, I lost the desire to ever contribute to that project again.