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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

> FOSS is so important

FOSS is nice, but it's not a silver bullet. In this case I think Linus is largely to thank. Things will be a lot harder if he decides to retire.

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A silver bullet is having one smart guy at the top who doesn't care how much pressure you exert on getting something into the codebase, or how much man-hours were spent (sunk cost fallacy). I think in a lot of "corporate" projects (not-open source) there's much less of that and the software is designed by commission, with the lead developer(s) quickly no longer having much of an influence on the code itself, being drawn away into meetings and such.

Maybe I'm projecting.

It’s an ideological situation to say the least... but it’s also what we have right know and god damn I’m thankful for it’s beautiful rarity.

> A silver bullet is having one smart guy at the top who doesn't care how much pressure you exert on getting something into the codebase,

Well if Linus goes too far, Google and a couple other big corporate contributors could team up and fork Linux, and it would be very hard for the open project to compete. I think the fact that Linus is so good is a big part of what makes the whole thing hold together.

They could, and they often do (Android and ChromeOS effectively run forked kernels). At the end of the day though, they always wanna rebase against that sweet sweet mainline quality.

It's simple, the stack of hacks they produced in the meantime at some point becomes a tall tower prone to fall over.

I think this is dead on. I think at Microsoft that guy was Dave Cutler. Most of the really well designed stuff seems to have him at the helm - NT4.0, bits of XP, Win2k, Windows Server 2003 and then Azure.

I have a suspicion that Satya's rise to CEOdom via Azure's success could be attributed to him too.

If you're a Cutler fan you may enjoy Showstopper[1], an account of the creation of NT.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

Thanks for the rec, looks interesting.

It's a great book. Motivated me to switch industries and relocate to Seattle as an NT kernel programmer.

This may be true, but FOSS does not magically make it happen. Many FOSS projects are led or dominated by large companies today; the development may happen in the open, but it is as "corporate" as it gets, and no bullshit calling occurs (or if it does, it is quickly silenced with EWONTFIX & co.)

That's only partially true. When you only have one corporations interests, things get shady very quickly. When you have multiple, competing corporations, they have a vested interest in keeping their competitors honest. It would be very rare indeed to find something that every company wanted to downplay at the same time.

Spectre and meltdown are a great example of this. Sure, ARM, Intel, and (to a lesser extent) AMD may want to downplay these things, but Google did not, so it became a big deal anyway.

> This may be true, but FOSS does not magically make it happen

So what? Nobody said that. This is a strawman.

Of course FOSS is not sufficient. Look at any homework-style GitHub repo. Nobody disputes that.

All that is said is that FOSS is necessary to achieve this level of quality.

We may be we can train an MBA to do Linus's job? ;)

So you demote FOSS from "important" to "nice" just because it isn't a silver bullet? (which does not exist, anyway)

That doesn't make any sense. This is a strawman argument.

Nobody ever said that FOSS is a silver bullet, not even FSFE, FSF, or Stallman himself.

This is as good a place to ask the question nobody likes to discuss, but is important to never forget - what do we do when the bus hits Linus?

I believe Greg Kroah-Hartman is the designated successor.

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