Comment by skywal_l 3 days ago
It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects, none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a strong signal of things to come.
Did I say anything is run poorly? Or good for that matter? The difference is intent. Run for community and run for corporate are both different. Currenlty Linus is the only thing standing in the way of LF pulling another Rust Foundation. Cos it's run by corporates as well. Time will tell.
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/ [2] https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/torvalds-say...
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
GHOULS doesn't even begin to describe the people who take over these foundations. They are parasites who seek out nonprofits to infiltrate, and once they gain a position of power they bring in their pals and set up shop. Suddenly the CoC is weaponized to crush dissent, the decisions are made behind closed doors, and the organization starts contributing to political organizations that help their class of parasites spread. And there are WAY more of them than there are good-hearted honest people starting foundations. When a new foundation is created, these parasites line up to see who can corrupt it first.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.