So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.
So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.
A thousand years from now there will be priests delivering sermons on the Book of Linus