The Linux desktop needs a leader figure. A Steve Jobs, or a Linus Torvalds.
Leave it to the community, and everybody wants to reinvent the wheel and paint it their favourite colour. Directed innovation can only be achieved from a single vantage point, not by a committee, let alone a ragtag of independent actors.
And regular for profit companies aren't incompatible with Linux. Canonical, Red Hat, etc. make billions from open source.
Let me stress this again: the only reason the Linux desktop sucks is organizational. Not monetary, not technological. Linux would be a niche project today if Linus had been replaced by a committee or other loose organization. The Linux kernel is successful because there is a person at the top saying "No."
The Linux desktop has no such thing. None of the singular desktop environment have such a thing. GNOME has no BDFL, nor does KDE. So its endless bikeshedding and churning and going nowhere.
Right confluence of factors to a large extent. GNU needed a kernel, and BSD was mired in legal trouble. Linux was there at the right time to provide a GNU-friendly kernel made from scratch.
I think the GPL was also a fortunate choice. It ensured large companies couldn't easily have a closed in-house version and had incentives to contribute to the common good.
I think you mean https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Point is, it's Linus that merges what he wants in his tree. The kernel development isn't a democratic process, not everything has to be. Everybody can fork it and be the big boss themselves, the fact that nobody and no company has succeeded in doing so is worth thinking about.
You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free.
That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.
How does that invalidate my point? GP asked why people would contribute to leader-directed open source without coercion. I just pointed out no coercion is needed. Free or paid is irrelevant.
> How do you propose that people work *for free* at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work?
(Emphasis mine)
No coercion is involved, but they don't work for free, either. Free vs. paid is extremely relevant. If you were to strip out the paid contributions from the driver tree, for example, you'd be left with a handful of drivers, virtually none of which cover non-trivial devices released in the last fifteen years or so with anything near full functionality.
Is that a meaningful distinction? I don't think the point was that the people actually writing the code aren't paid, but rather it still holds when you consider that the people paying them choose to allocate those efforts to a dictatorial organization rather than addressing their goals in some other way.