Will we all be fucked or is there a Linus 2?
Linus is getting old and its time to pick his replacement.
And its you! Congratulations! I hope your ready
So I just click commit and it works? Wow, this is easy!
GNU will spring their plan into motion for world domination, and send anyone who has said Linux and not GNU/Linux to GNUlag
They will finally release HURD
The real HURD is the friends we made along the way.
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His firstborn son will take over as Linus II, as is tradition.
The far future: A man sits at a table, staring at a floating hologram display. He watches as an indecipherable block of alphanumeric characters wiggles and splits into two segments. He nods slowly.
He takes a breath and closes his eyes, broadcasting a message to everyone on duty that day.
“Merge the request. Tell Linus#3418 that Wayland is now the default display manager.”
For King and Kernel!
Hm, he and his wife are getting on in years. If they want a son, they should probably get on that right away.
A number of candidates will create their own forks and there will be a long Game of Thrones style war between different factions. After couple of weeks each distro will choose the fork they will make the default one and people will split into warring factions. After that we will enter a nuclear winter style period lasting couple of years during which 90% of post on Lemmy will be just shitposting the rival forks. After a decade or two of backstabbing, dirty politics and other drama new dictator will be selected and all will be back to normal.
“The Lannisters send their commits”
he stabs him
So like systemd but ten times more dramatic.
We will switch to GNU/Hurd.
Then we will plug a USB device and remember that Hurd doesn’t support that yet.
There shouldn’t be another Linus. The model of a single maintainer holding so much importance is fundamentally flawed, especially for a project with the size and importance of Linux. Responsibilities and decision making should be distributed among stakeholders and volunteers. It will take time to rebuild around that sort of structure.
I’ve also heard tell that the linux-kernel mailing list has become extremely toxic, especially to newcomers. A professor that I have a lot of respect for has stopped teaching his kernel drivers course because one of his students received death threats related to her involvement. If a change in the tenor doesn’t happen, less and less of the fresh blood that Linux needs will join.
Clone him
you mean fork him under a new maintainer?
Git clone
There are plenty of other tech youtubers to watch.
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.
*Greg Kroah-Hartman
But what happens when GKH and Linus are hit by a bus? The same bus. At the same time.
BSD fanatics driving the bus
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.
Dr Stone but for computers/software dev…
Linus teaches them all best practices and then takes a 2 week hiatus from kernel dev to write a tool that defeats the demon lord.
“Known for: ReiserFS, murder” kinda makes it sound like the dude invented both.
Or was sentenced for both.
‘No your honour, that’s not what committing ReiserFS means’
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.
I prefer to call it the lottery factor.
Then the propheciced hurdnus will rise and awaken a new era of foss
We’re actually on the 10th Linus now, so the next one will be LinuXI
Still waiting for LinusXI Pro Max.
For a moment I thought this post was about the LTT host. And was like they could replace him with any of his doppelgangers in the group and no one will notice.
That is what this post is about, IDK who this Torvalds guy is.
Fucking LMAO 💀
Peak Lemmy content
You fell for it
Removed by mod
Linus has stepped away from kernel development before, and probably will again. Life continues on.
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.
Greg K-H is the presumed successor and there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t do the same.
