If, for whatever reason, progress on the torvalds/linux.git repository is affected, someone has to get things moving within 72 hours. This person could either be the one who organized the most recent Maintainer Summit or the chair of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB).
They will be tasked with pulling together the people who were invited to the last summit, along with members of the TAB.
It gets more complicated after that, but essentially that’s it.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure there already is more than one top maintainers for the kernel code anyhow.
So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.
tl;dr:
It gets more complicated after that, but essentially that’s it.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure there already is more than one top maintainers for the kernel code anyhow.
So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.
A thousand years from now there will be priests delivering sermons on the Book of Linus
Whats so special about 72 hours? It sounds like it would selfdestruct if nobody presses the dead man switch every 3 days?
4815162342
Is this another inside joke? I don’t get it.
Never seen Lost?
Oh, deep cut. I did not see that string as separate numbers. Thank you for the explanation.
Thanks for the tldr, it’s a simple fix but at least now we have some plan instead of no plan.
The project must go on!