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Comment by eddieh | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I thought Linus famously didn't use project infrastructure, no project management, no bug tracker—just emails and patches. Linux hasn't suffered.

I'd wager Minix suffered from its original license (not really open source or "free" software) and Tanenbaum not being an egomaniac like Torvalds (for better or worse).

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Linux certainly has project management, bug tracking, and lots of infrastructure. What it famously rejected were inadequate centralized systems that break the way kernel developers and maintainers actually work. Before the tools were there there already was a large human-operated distributed management system that ran on top of email. A lot of linux project operations are still a large semi-automated distributed management system that runs on top of email. It's gotten somewhat more centralized now, as a single source of truth is very useful for tracking bugs, but just because there's a single root to the tree of maintainers doesn't mean it's a a project run by Linus alone, and just because it's not using jira or gitlab or whatever the flavour of the day is doesn't mean it has no project infrastructure.

But Linus is still in total charge of linux and we have yet to see, how it works out without him. And with Minix, itseems Tannenbaum is not really in charge anymore?

That's not really true even if he is in a sort of BDFL role. There are maintainers who handle most of the day to day decision-making and there's enough money involved you can be pretty sure that Linux would keep on going with or without any single individual.

This. You even have people who do the final merges other than Linus - in the form of LTS (security/bugfix) updates.

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