Will we all be fucked or is there a Linus 2?
We’re actually on the 10th Linus now, so the next one will be LinuXI
Nothing. Linus doesn’t personally do coding on the kernel, he has a team who do that and he oversees it and makes the hard decisions.
There are others who will take his place and the work will continue.
If somehow the entire kernel team shut down, Google, Samsung or some other large corporation would take it over and continue development because at this point many, many, many servers, phones, smart devices, iot, and other appliances rely on the Linux kernel to function.
It simply cannot be left to die.
“Today here at Microsoft we are celebrating the legacy of the late Linus Torvalds by releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot. No GPL code was touched, merely re-written, and we will offer ISOs to the coding community for free! Stay tuned for more updates, as we will be exclusively developing on this kernel going forward! This is a great day for open source!”
Golang is a Google thing, Microsoft would probably use C#
https://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 It’s now ‘old code using outdated APIs’ and is considered obsolete.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.
We need to consider truck-kun factor, where the developer get isekai-ed.
“I’ll Become the Strongest Adventurer in the Other World with My Maximum Level Open Source Operating System Development Skills.”
Title seems a little short…
“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.”
I would so read that book.
We’ve all agreed that when he dies it would be disrespectful to keep using Linux so we’ll pack it up and switch to Windows from them on.
But what happens when Bill Gates is dead?!
We all become MacroHard
