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Over the past week, news came out that Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, is taking time off to address his behavior issues. For those of us who know Linus, he is known for speaking his mind and being very condescending toward people, often erupting into insults and personal attacks on mailing lists. His attacks on Intel for their Spectre patch were only one example of many. The culture created by the top leader has caused several top developers, specifically Sarah Sharp, who maintained the USB 3.0 drivers, to leave.
Why is this important?
Linux is no longer the operating system that you downloaded from a Bulletin Board System (BBS) in 1992 at 9600 baud onto a stack of 3.5 inch floppies and were really careful to not accidentally blow away your DOS/Windows 3.1 install with. Unlike almost every other single operating system, however, there has been one person at the top, Linus himself.
The world has completely changed, and Linux has too. This is the operating system that now powers most of the major cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace. Even Microsoft, a much-avowed enemy of Linux in the past, now utilizes it. The competitors from when it began, except for FreeBSD, Windows, and AIX, are mostly either dead (Digital UNIX, IRIX) or on life support (Solaris, HP-UX, VMS, OS/2, etc.).
No operating system out there has had a successful run like it. No operating system out there in such wide use has had the same person at the top for 27 years that I can think of. Linus Torvalds is the Gordie Howe of kernel development. The late Gordie Howe, for those of you who do not know, besides being the best hockey player not named Wayne Gretzky, played long enough to play professionally with his children in games with the New England Whalers.
Linux is also the same OS that many hobbyists moved to when their platforms ceased development. A vast number of the hardcore Linux users started out on Commodores, Amigas, Ataris, Spectrums and Apples, and skipped Windows entirely. The Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic and hackability attracted many of them. The development talent that once got home computers to do things their engineers never anticipated moved to where...