Can he? What would he be able to take and leave? What would that do to Linux?
This question has been on my mind for a long time, but never got around to asking it.
Nah anyone can just fork the kernel anytime
Free software doesn’t have owners, that is kinda the point of free licensing.
Someone else would do whatever Linus does now. I am not sure what exactly that is nowadays. In fact it is already now the case that if he (or any maintainer of any FOSS) did a bad job maintaining it, someone else could step in, do a better job and many people would switch to that fork.
Not quite true. Code still has copyright owners and they are not bound by terms of free software licenses (they use licenses to allow other people to use their code). This means that copyright owner can make their code proprietary at any time, or change the license to any other. Although they can’t do anything about previously released versions AFAIK.
However in case of projects with many contributors that don’t have a CLA (which transfers an ownership to some organization) nothing can be changed in practice since every contributor owns their piece of code and will have to consent to the change of license. Linux is such a project so it will forever remain GPLv2 licensed.
I know all of that. The “not have owners” wording was mainly a reference to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html
I imagine the inner circle is very like minded and he’s planned for his departure substantially more than Bram Moolenaar (“What’s your long term plan for vim?” “keep me alive”) My prediction: Linux will remain more or less the same.
The project is open source so it would keep going, at worst case people could fork it or whatever. They would just lift up one of the maintainers to take Linus’ job. I don’t know how this would apply to the Linux foundation, but I think he still would be replaceable, it’s all designed that way, because IT sector wouldn’t have all it’s eggs in one basket that might break if one guy leaves or dies.
because IT sector wouldn’t have all it’s eggs in one basket that might break if one guy leaves or dies.
Whooooooooboy, that has not been my experience in tech!
I’ve worked with both kind of companies. Current one doesn’t really care about Bus factor, but currently, for myself personally, that’s just a bonus as after every project it would be even more difficult to onboard someone to my position. And then I’ve worked with companies who hire people to improve bus factor actively. When done correctly that’s a really, really good thing. And when it’s done badly it just grinds everything down to almost halt as people spend their time in nonsensical meetings and writing documentation no-one really cares about.
Balancing that equation is not a easy task and people who are good at it deserve every penny they’re paid for it. And, again just for me, if I get overrun by a bus tomorrow, then it’s not my problem anymore and as the company doesn’t really care about that then I won’t either.
Glad someone finally mentioned Bus Factor.
On topic, I wonder if Linux technically has a bus factor problem. In theory, anyone could fork, take all the source give and start making Johnix, Tomix, or Whosix. Everything is documented and all the code is available.
In the real world, you have multiple teams and individuals submitting code from all over the world. Sure you’ve got the Linux Foundation, but who would have the respect and authority to keep everyone contributing instead of forking off?
With Linux the scale alone makes it pretty difficult to maintain any kind of fork. Handful of individuals just can’t compete with a global effort and it’s pretty well understood that the power Linux has becomes from those globally spread devs working towards a common goal. So, should Linux Foundation cease to exist tomorrow I’d bet that something similar would raise to take it’s place.
For the respect/authority side, I don’t really know. Linux is important enough for governments too, so maybe some entity ran by United nations or something similar could do?
Google soft-forked Linux for Android (maintained in parallel IIRC) but re-merged into the mainline, presumably because why maintain a whole operating system?
In theory the Linux Foundation would keep Google, Microsoft, AMD, whoever playing nice with each other for mutual benefit and maintenance of Linux, but like you said, and the source of my worry, is who else would have Linus’ combination of prestige, principles, and perseverance?
I’m sure there are others who could fill the role, but even Linus is still bullying Nvidia with only partial success. The most vital role Linus probably has had for some time now is leadership. But even someone who might have superior soft-skills wouldn’t have the history, which certainly contributes to his authority.
It is impossible for an individual, barring a very niche case. And why waste labor provided by someone else? So far as I know, edge is base on, but not a fork of chromium. If that is microsoft’s approach, I can’t imagine anyone doing differently. Except for maybe a government “forking” by close sourcing a “fork”. (Which someone has definitely done). What’s going to come of that? The FSF suing the US department of defense? I’d support it, but good luck.
It has absolutely never happened before that one guy had to spend some time in a government facility. No. Not at all.
you can move away from the gpl but everything up to that point will remain. essentially anyone can fork what it is right up to the point its not and call it charlix or such. The fact the name is from him makes it more sensible for him to stay on track. I mean he will be in the history books no matter but the optics would not be great to abandon it now.
You can’t just replace the licence with a new, more restrictive, one. Unless each and every contributor to the codebase agrees
Actually you can’t do that at all. Licenses are not revocable
Wrong(ish). You’re correct in that you cannot revoke previous licenses, but you can license new code differently if all copyright holders agree.
No you can make new code under any license without approval.
I think if every contributor ever agreed, you could switch to a more permissive license that permits a superset of the original license.
The direction of your change doesn’t matter, the GPL license under which the program was already given out is not revocable.
If all copyright holders agree you can grant a different license in addition to the first one, or you can stop offering one license and start offering another one, all the new changes that were never offered under the first one will then only be publicly available under the new license.
But anyone who received the code at a specific time with a GPL license can keep it, modify it, distribute it onwards with the same license and so on, no matter what new terms the copyright holders begin to offer to other people later.
Should we add a little key? Should we add a little line? Who the fuck are you? I’m a brat when I’m forkin’ that.
what exactly do you think Linus does?
He puts people in their place and takes no prisoners while sipping the blood of shit-committers out of wine glasses forged from their skulls.
Yes true, but aside from that?
Lately, afaik, he mostly merges the with of others. Mind you, that is a gargantuan task on its own.
The question is probably more related to what he has done rather than what he is doing right now, and he is kind of famous for having created Linux in the past. To someone who doesn’t know anything about Linux licenses I think it would be easy to suspect that Torvalds might have some kind of ownership of his creation.
Yes, but none of the toys (or few, and not the big ones) are his. The GPL means the rest of the community could fork Linux from its current state and continue without him.
And he doesn’t really do that much these days anyway. He tries to be hands off as much as possible, because Linux is much bigger than just him, and he won’t be around forever. The biggest thing he personally owns is the Linux trademark. (Not sure how involved he is in the Linux foundation day to day.)
If by “toys” you mean like “linux” and “git” then no.
Edit to expand: They aren’t really his. They’re GPL’d so anyone can do anything* with them
- within the provisions of the GPL
To add some nuance to the rest of the comments posted here: GPL’d code can be made proprietary, if the copyright holders all agree. For example, given a project that requires copyright assignment, if the project owner decides to take it proprietary, they can do that, because they’re the copyright owner. GPL alone is not enough to keep a codebase FLOSS. Luckily, both the kernel and git have hundreds of copyright owners (and does not require copyright assignment), so legally changing the license of either of them is practically impossible. So, really, Linus wouldn’t be able to take anything, code wise. He could take his future work, yeah, but he hasn’t been doing much development for the past decade.
Otherwise… He let go of git pretty early on, and it’s been maintained by Junio ever since. So nothing would happen there whatsoever, Linus’ retirement (friendly or otherwise) would be inconsequential for git.
The kernel has capable maintainers who have been maintaining stable trees for a long while now (often with companies backing them), and people who have been maintaining large subtrees. There’s a considerable overlap there, too. In short, there are a fair number of people who could fill in for Linus in a pinch. There’d be a small hiccup, and that’s about it. His skills and experience would be missed, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.
He would Prob give the power to the open source community.
First of all, it’s been a while since it’s no longer his code, and the contributions from whatever amount of people must be respected. That was used some time back as justification to never moving to GPL3 or latest.
Second, there’s now a huge foundation behind it. Although he has gating approval for whatever he wants, the money coming from big enterprises would cease. Remember now MS already claims it loves linux.
Third, although it’s pretty linked to second, the project is not an independent community project anymore. Even risc-v people took care not to create a so nation specific project (even though its origins are totally linked to the academy from a particular one), that it doesn’t matter which country imposes sanctions to others, no country can prevent another from using its open ISA to build their own stuff. Linux, and its linux foundation failed on this, and as it’s pretty dependent on the big tech and enterprise, now it has no options to be compliant. Which you could see recently from banning developers and the legal reasons involved (well done, as risc-v, that would have had minimal impact, or better yet, if a community project not linked to any country, then that would have gone differently).
All in all, linux’s success has lead it to be a non community driven, non independent project, and I would guess the enterprise and big tech, which is pretty reliant on linux now a days, wouldn’t let linux go away unless they already have an alternative.
Though never say never right? But my take on this is both, no single person owns linux, so no single person can take it away, and there’s too much reliance on it from big tech and enterprises as to let such important project, and key on their software supply chain (years back thinking on software supply chain was in no one’s mind) or so they say.
Not much. Except for less competent leadership short term. And probably more forks long term.
