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Comment by Perados | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if one of these invisible heroes dies ? What would happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies? What would happen to curl is Daniel Stenberg dies? For curl for instance, only Daniel can sign a release. So what happens if he is not able to do so anymore? This is just a small example, but you get the idea. There is so much power under under these men that it sometimes gets very scary.

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> For curl for instance, only Daniel can sign a release.

I don't believe that's quite true. Anyone can sign a curl release, so can I. It's just that Daniel's key being used to sign a release of curl carries the trust that this is legitimate. If he were to pass away or be somehow incapacitated, another curl maintainer could start signing the releases.

I have a trusted friend and he will receive a mail when I'm gone automatically. Things like this are handled in it.

It sucks to think about it, but I'm glad that I've set up Gmail's inactive account manager this way.

The Linux kernel is a massive project with a web of contributors and maintainers, and it's clear which of the senior level members could step in at any given time.

Big open-source projects have plenty of meatspace to draw on. It's the little projects that 'come from somewhere' that actually only have one or two people 'in the know' that are the ones at risk.

More importantly for Linux, curl, etc., almost nobody uses Linux from Linus or curl from Daniel. You get it from your distributor, and in the case of Linux it usually comes with quite a few patches. These distributors (even the all-volunteer ones like Debian) are projects involving lots of people and clearly defined procedures for what to do if one of their maintainers stops being able to contribute.

A good example is glibc; several years back, a huge number of people were using the eglibc fork, not because glibc upstream (Ulrich Drepper) stopped being able to do releases, but simply because he was refusing patches for architectures he didn't like and other similar changes. Very few end users even noticed that they weren't using "real" glibc. (Ulrich has now stepped down and the eglibc changes have been merged back in.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Thank you for this! Will always keep it in mind!

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