On Oct 20, 2013 10:44 PM, "Tanstaafl" <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org> wrote:
>
> On 2013-10-20 6:52 AM, Daniel Campbell <lists@sporkbox.us> wrote:
>>
>> So they spend a lot of money hiring developers. The more important
>> question is what is their agenda? What do they tell those developers to
>> *make*? You don't hire people without a business plan in mind.
>
>
> Well, once I understood their (Redhat's) motivation, which was/is enterprise/cloud/vm oriented (which is why they were so concerned about parallelism for startup, etc) - I dropped the conspiracy theory aspect of it all... it actually does make sense in that context.
>
> And as long as Linus is at the helm of kernel development, I'm not too worried about the systemd guys doing too much damage there - I just can't see him letting it happen.
>
> If I were the type to worry just for the sake of worrying, I'd be wondering what may happen down the road, if Linus were to suddenly lose interest in kernel development (for whatever reason) and walk away from it - who/what would take over the reins? But that would be pointless...
>

Linus isnt actually actively developing the kernel nowadays. Mostly he just merges commits from his "trusted lieutenants" in charge of various subsystems. The notion of Linus as being at the helm is mostly just a convenient fiction that corporate culture (and by extension, the media) - which is used to "strong leadership" - uses to make sense of open source development.

That's partly why he finds it funny when people take his flames too seriously, as if they were Word of God.

If he took were cut down by a sith lord, most likely morton's tree would seamlessly be the new upstream.