I think this is by design. I once contributed to git, and it required putting a patch in the mailing list. It certainly forced you to be sure your code was spot on.
And it will discourage new users from contributing. Thus, only boomers and corpos will contribute, and over time Linux becomes a de facto corporate owned committee.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor is a thing that any GOOD project or IT department considers. How many of your staff can you afford to lose if they all happen to be travelling in the same bus, on their way to eat at the same place for lunch when an asteroid inevitably punches through said bus and/or diner.
‘Hit by an asteroid’ is a little unrealistic. Sentenced to prison for 15 to Life has happened in the Open Source community at least once before. The project I linked to had a Bus Factor of about one. It’s now ‘old code using outdated APIs’ and is considered obsolete.
I’ve personally seen legal and criminal issues for a single individual cripple IT departments before, meaning their bus factor was also way too low. I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems. Natural disaster, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are very serious existential threats to even the largest of organizations.
Since Linux seems to be a good project, I can’t imagine that the discussion hasn’t been had, in public or in private. Millions of individuals and dozens upon dozens of big corporations depend on Linux, Open source and otherwise. If the bus comes for core maintainers or project leaders we have at least SOME backup.
I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems.
Wow, incredible management skills, genius move to treat your one critical employee like a piece of shit.
Yeah, that was close to the end of that job. I didn’t want to be there, and that particular manager was really upset that they couldn’t just eliminate those servers. He wanted his folks trained on them, but then refused to actually let them spend any time training on them. I was a scapegoat and took the severance deal ASAP.
when an asteroid inevitably punches through said bus and/or diner.
Or, you know there is a crash? Lol
I’ve never heard it with the asteroid explanation. But thousands of people die every year in car crashes. Most in single occupant vehicles, but a bus can be involved too.
“Brave Hero from Finland, you’ve been struck by a bus and are going to reincarnate into–”
“No I wasn’t. That bus CHASED ME DOWN two alleys, over a fire hydrant, into, and out of a Starbucks. It did NOT hit me. You just summoned me here.”
“Err… anyway, this world needs a hero to–”
“Write hardware drivers? A kernel module? Some inline assembly?”
"Err… the demon lord… er… "
“DID YOU EVEN MAIL THE LIST? Hah… Okay. Does this world have logic gates of any kind? I need to get this knocked out as soon as possible. I’ve got the entirety of the bcachefs patchset to review before 6.7 is in release.”
Is it still maintained ? I’d probably go with FreeBSD if I’m switching to BSD at all. It has ZFS out of the box and has support for nvidia’s non opensource driver. I have used it as a desktop OS for a good 3 months, it was pretty good (even though I couldn’t game on it)
There will not be a Linus 2, but rather there will be a peaceful transfer of “power”.
Linus is not the Benevolent Dictator For Life of the Linux Kernel.
Linus has already stepped away from developing the Kernel. He did this after an incident to work on his professionalism & mannerisms towards people. Kernel development did not stop. Linus does not approve and merge every patch into the Kernel.
Rather it is more likely that the Lead Maintainer/Developer changes to Greg Kroah-Hartmon, and the project does not skip a beat.
Rest assured with something as important as the Linux Kernel: development will keep going.
Everyone is making jokes but the thought has occurred to me: Yes, we have an organisation in place that is ready to replace him. But, from what I understand, he IS the benevolent dictator, and he has used his power a few times to stop some changes that otherwise would be in the kernel right now. And I think that’s a good thing.
There will be so many forks trying to continue a Kernel based on linux and i think a few will succeeded! We may use arch kernel or debian kernel in the future.
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