Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him

pacopico writes: In a typically blunt interview, Linus Torvalds has said for the first time that if he were to die, Linux could safely continue on its own. Bloomberg has the report, which includes a video with Torvalds at his home office. Torvalds insists that people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have taken over huge parts of the day-to-day work maintaining Linux and that they've built up enough trust to be respected. This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude. The line between "blunt" and "aggressive" is one that you probably get to skirt a lot, when you (in the words of the Bloomberg reporter) "may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years."

Comments

Re:speaking as an engineer, it happens.

[buchner.johannes]

It seems strange to me that with all the decentralization in software (ex. git) that Linus remains the sole gatekeeper for what goes or doesn't go in the kernel. Splitting up the responsibility seems like it would be infinitely more logical.

It is already largely decentralized. There is a relatively fixed set of subsystem maintainers, which collect patches and merge from contributors. Then there are top figures like Greg and Linus, and the individual Linux distributions which maintain their own kernels by merging across. All Linus really does (well, he probably does more) is take and drop patches and every other week declare a certain merge set a version. Anyone can do that for their own kernel, but the central naming makes it "Linux" and focussed (e.g. for bug reporting).

That's at least my understanding.