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Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.6 after running out of excuses for further work
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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I get that Linus is a superhero, but it's still so weird to me that this vital piece of the world's infrastructure relies on one man.
OSS is heavily undermaintained, always has been. But the world hasn't exploded from it yet (somehow).
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.