Nobody is immune to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or fatal heart failure – not even Linus Torvalds, who still has the final say in the development of the kernel he named Linux. This worries many, as there is no public record of who or what would take over leadership in case of an emergency.
i’ve often wondered if Linux will die once he’s gone… it will probably become a giant clusterfuck of shit
A lot of clusterfucks have been under Linus though. Anger issues and abuse on the mailing list, rust on linux being stalled unfairly by other maintainers, bcachefs being ejected from the kernel or the fact that Linux’s monolithic design makes it really hard for third party out of tree modules to exist if they don’t have a path to upstream since torvalds doesn’t really consider them (openZFS is a good example).
Oh and who can forget torvalds unleashing his inner Finnish Nazi when booting out Russian defense companies from the kernel, citing vague sanctions requirements and what not.
I honestly don’t like the BDFL leadership of the kernel. I think it should just be taken over by a engineering committee at this point as the kernel is no longer close to what it was size and scope wise in the 2.x era.
Just an FYI that Bcachefs’ maintainer is a full of himself asshole with no regard to the collaborative process of the kernel.
But I do agree that the Kernel should be led by a committee, though most likely the IRL implementation of that would be corpo AF
Agreed on the bcachefs engineer being a thorn on everyone’s side, but this also implicates torvalds since he merged bcachefs in the first place and also stalled for so long on Overstreet’s behavior (probably just due to fatigue).
