Is the Linux community going to become more, or less dependent on the skills of Linus Torvalds?
I think it will be as dependent. It’s hard to imagine it being more dependent. It’s also not really clear that it needs to be less dependent. What Linus does is maintain the ever-unpopular position of rejecting stuff that doesn’t belong in the kernel (the core of an operating system). The skills the Linux community will ultimately depend on are more his ability to reject than his ability to write any new code. Will there come a point when the code becomes so unmanageable that it prevents the community from making major improvements without breaking too many other things? A year ago, when Linux was streaking upwards, when it was just beginning to have the varsity-level characteristics of the proprietary Unix world, the question people asked me was, “How do you know you’ll be able to stay on this track, or are you going to plateau the same way the rest of the Unix kernels did?” At that time, I did not have an answer to that question. I now do. The key discriminating function of the main
