2011 is actually the same year Firefox started their rapid versioning to try and match Chrome. There was definitely a shift in versioning styles around then.
I blame browsers for their out of control versioning.
Chrome is on version 118 now and gets a bump roughly every 6 months. Firefox is 4 years older, yet they started following the same rapid versioning at version 5 to “keep up” with Chrome which was already on version 12 but a younger browser.
I think its better to think of it like a president or prime minister. He might set the plan and direction and making the big decisions, but there are thousands of others supporting and making the plan actually happen.
In the past he has delegated the release to others as well.
So if the worst would happen, the linux project would continue operating fairly seamlessly.
It's also mind blowing to consider that as many other projects, both Linux and Python started as a hobyist project never meant to do more than cater to some personal needs.
This taught me how important is allocating time for your team for their personal projects, as the next school romance anime tagging system could be the cornerstone of every AI in the future.
Except 99.999% of personal projects won’t be that popular and allocating time for personal projects is a waste in that regard. Basically you’d be playing lottery and not get anything out of it.
There’s plenty of reasons to encourage personal projects, but this isn’t one of them.
I didn’t, but I get why. It’s a specious argument — it doesn’t matter if 99% of them are useless. It matters if the 1% that become ubiquitous for whatever reason provide utility that makes the useless ones worth it.
Yeah you can run a company that never provides any time or resources to tinker, but only if you’re okay with innovation never happening again.
Plus, for that other 99%, the developers probably tried out a new framework or language or something. They aren’t claiming to “know” something based on watching a YouTube vid. It wasn’t wasted time.
Maybe because it's a wise investment to encourage knowledge workers gain additional experience working on things they enjoy even if you might not be able to pick up one of those things and directly make another revenue stream out of it.
The kernel will figure something out. There are already lots of companies investing their own development resources into it. Would just need a new leader to emerge. Perhaps it’d be a rotating group of people who are responsible for managing a single release.
Tons of smaller but important projects don’t have this luxury, though.
The kernel is totally safe. I don’t see anything happening to it. Even if something were to happen to Linus (oh hell no, please live forever).
But that’s not true for the projects that don’t do headlines, everyone uses, and nobody knows. When you install software and it has like 200 MB dependencies, half of those are probably unmaintained.
Also, the term maintained is not clear. Is a project with.a single contributor and some commits this year maintained? How about tons of contributors in the past but only a release 2 years ago? And you have to differenciate the usages too, curl is dead if it does not get updated, some config parser, ls, or cat is maybe as stable as they can be.
That’s because it doesn’t : ) He is the top level engineer/manager for releases and technical consultation but there are many more engineers “under” him leading and moving the pieces into place.
I don't actually follow the release schedule of the Linux kernel, but yeah, I was a little confused when I saw the mid-story link where he said roughly the same thing about 6.5 over the summer. That said, if we are going to call out middle aged men for repeating jokes, I'm in trouble.
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