[PLUG] Linus is mad at a kernel maintainer

[Paul Heinlein]

On Sat, 29 Dec 2012, Bill Thoen wrote:

> if they don't like the BDFL and can't directly challenge him 
> successfully, then they are free to go elsewhere. If the BDFL starts 
> to lose it, or wants to retire or goes over the rainbow, what 
> happens?

The history of gcc is illustrative.

The 1997 egcs fork ran an end-around on gcc and became the main branch 
a couple years later. The mainline team had stalled, so it was 
demoted (so to speak).

Currently, LLVM and GCC are competing for mindshare, the former 
offering analytics not available in the latter.

I suspect that if Linus "goes over the rainbow," and Linux starts to 
become irrelevent, similar things will happen.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W