Can he? What would he be able to take and leave? What would that do to Linux?
This question has been on my mind for a long time, but never got around to asking it.
The project is open source so it would keep going, at worst case people could fork it or whatever. They would just lift up one of the maintainers to take Linus’ job. I don’t know how this would apply to the Linux foundation, but I think he still would be replaceable, it’s all designed that way, because IT sector wouldn’t have all it’s eggs in one basket that might break if one guy leaves or dies.
because IT sector wouldn’t have all it’s eggs in one basket that might break if one guy leaves or dies.
Whooooooooboy, that has not been my experience in tech!
It has absolutely never happened before that one guy had to spend some time in a government facility. No. Not at all.
what exactly do you think Linus does?
He puts people in their place and takes no prisoners while sipping the blood of shit-committers out of wine glasses forged from their skulls.
Yes true, but aside from that?
Lately, afaik, he mostly merges the with of others. Mind you, that is a gargantuan task on its own.
The question is probably more related to what he has done rather than what he is doing right now, and he is kind of famous for having created Linux in the past. To someone who doesn’t know anything about Linux licenses I think it would be easy to suspect that Torvalds might have some kind of ownership of his creation.
I imagine the inner circle is very like minded and he’s planned for his departure substantially more than Bram Moolenaar (“What’s your long term plan for vim?” “keep me alive”) My prediction: Linux will remain more or less the same.
If by “toys” you mean like “linux” and “git” then no.
Edit to expand: They aren’t really his. They’re GPL’d so anyone can do anything* with them
- within the provisions of the GPL
Nah anyone can just fork the kernel anytime
Yes, but none of the toys (or few, and not the big ones) are his. The GPL means the rest of the community could fork Linux from its current state and continue without him.
And he doesn’t really do that much these days anyway. He tries to be hands off as much as possible, because Linux is much bigger than just him, and he won’t be around forever. The biggest thing he personally owns is the Linux trademark. (Not sure how involved he is in the Linux foundation day to day.)
Free software doesn’t have owners, that is kinda the point of free licensing.
Someone else would do whatever Linus does now. I am not sure what exactly that is nowadays. In fact it is already now the case that if he (or any maintainer of any FOSS) did a bad job maintaining it, someone else could step in, do a better job and many people would switch to that fork.
First of all, it’s been a while since it’s no longer his code, and the contributions from whatever amount of people must be respected. That was used some time back as justification to never moving to GPL3 or latest.
Second, there’s now a huge foundation behind it. Although he has gating approval for whatever he wants, the money coming from big enterprises would cease. Remember now MS already claims it loves linux.
Third, although it’s pretty linked to second, the project is not an independent community project anymore. Even risc-v people took care not to create a so nation specific project (even though its origins are totally linked to the academy from a particular one), that it doesn’t matter which country imposes sanctions to others, no country can prevent another from using its open ISA to build their own stuff. Linux, and its linux foundation failed on this, and as it’s pretty dependent on the big tech and enterprise, now it has no options to be compliant. Which you could see recently from banning developers and the legal reasons involved (well done, as risc-v, that would have had minimal impact, or better yet, if a community project not linked to any country, then that would have gone differently).
All in all, linux’s success has lead it to be a non community driven, non independent project, and I would guess the enterprise and big tech, which is pretty reliant on linux now a days, wouldn’t let linux go away unless they already have an alternative.
Though never say never right? But my take on this is both, no single person owns linux, so no single person can take it away, and there’s too much reliance on it from big tech and enterprises as to let such important project, and key on their software supply chain (years back thinking on software supply chain was in no one’s mind) or so they say.
To add some nuance to the rest of the comments posted here: GPL’d code can be made proprietary, if the copyright holders all agree. For example, given a project that requires copyright assignment, if the project owner decides to take it proprietary, they can do that, because they’re the copyright owner. GPL alone is not enough to keep a codebase FLOSS. Luckily, both the kernel and git have hundreds of copyright owners (and does not require copyright assignment), so legally changing the license of either of them is practically impossible. So, really, Linus wouldn’t be able to take anything, code wise. He could take his future work, yeah, but he hasn’t been doing much development for the past decade.
Otherwise… He let go of git pretty early on, and it’s been maintained by Junio ever since. So nothing would happen there whatsoever, Linus’ retirement (friendly or otherwise) would be inconsequential for git.
The kernel has capable maintainers who have been maintaining stable trees for a long while now (often with companies backing them), and people who have been maintaining large subtrees. There’s a considerable overlap there, too. In short, there are a fair number of people who could fill in for Linus in a pinch. There’d be a small hiccup, and that’s about it. His skills and experience would be missed, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.
He would Prob give the power to the open source community.
