> What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
> Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
I doubt that one. There are a lot of big companies who employ the core developers as well as the Linux Foundation which employs Greg K-H [1]. Unlike Firefox where there isn't much corporate interest behind it, there is an absurd amount of corporate interest behind Linux so in the worst case the Kernel will become a corporate committee joint effort, but definitely it won't go down the hell that Firefox currently is.
Having lots of corporations involved in something doesn't protect the direction it goes in. Corporate interests could easily, for example, try to start adding in closed source blobs or providing support for people doing so. In fact, when Linus is gone, they probably will.
Software projects do seem to benefit from having firm voices empowered to say "no". Committees are incapable of doing that. Sooner or later they end up stuffed with friendly people who compromise their way to yes. That isn't an unacceptable outcome, but it'll be a different and probably worse project when that happens.
I suppose there are counterexamples - like Debian. But they have some very interesting social traditions and they don't let just anyone in to the club.
Commitees will be formed, instead of linux for the people, there will be corporate committees, then of course the diversity and quota ones, and in the end, "the one that pleases the sponsors"... The end results? Instead of Linus showing the middle finger to Nvidia (again), they will issue a statement, that "without contributers nvidia, we're unable to... yada yada", and binary blobs (or worse) will become part of the kernel.
None of the core lieutenants would be doing that work if their interests wasn't aligned with Linus'.
The culture around kernel development is strong, at the risk of scaring away newcomers. But a tight knit community also means it probably wouldn't change much even without Linus.
> Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
I doubt that one. There are a lot of big companies who employ the core developers as well as the Linux Foundation which employs Greg K-H [1]. Unlike Firefox where there isn't much corporate interest behind it, there is an absurd amount of corporate interest behind Linux so in the worst case the Kernel will become a corporate committee joint effort, but definitely it won't go down the hell that Firefox currently is.
[1]: https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/