For longevity --- to perpetuate and provide for a path forward with growth and progress that supersedes any one individual. Individuals have a finite lifetime, corporations do not.
Open Source may offer the possibility of perpetuation but it typically does little to help plan, promote or insure it.
Organizationally, most successful open source projects are little dictatorships. It's a cute, simple and efficient way to organize a project --- simply appoint a "benevolent dictator for life" --- until you start to ponder what happens after the dictator is gone.
I'm thinking either chaos and disintegration or some corporation steps into the vacuum to assume leadership and control. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
At least they have addressed job 1.
Any organization that doesn't perpetuate itself has failed ... period, the end. There is nothing beyond. It's not possible for a failed, fractured, dysfunctional, non-existent entity to innovate.
Corporations are the worst organizations ... except for all the others that fail the primary test of survival.
To bring more money to stakeholders so they can fly their SUV for a safari in Africa or have s*x with underage people without being punished.
A cynical and snarky observation but one that inadvertently furthers my point.
What happens to the corporation if a leader dies in a SUV wreck on safari or gets arrested for statutory rape?
In most corporations, this flawed individual would be immediately replaced with minimal operational impact. Succession is a pre-planned aspect of the organizational structure.
Now, what happens to an Open Source project if this individual is the "benevolent dictator"? It is not a question of "if" but rather "when" this person's participation will end.
"One morning a colleague of mine turned to me and asked me if I would help him help out a friend of his who had just sent him some software that he had written. He forwarded the email he got from his friend on to me, and walked me through the accompanying instructions. That afternoon after work I installed the software as per instructions onto my 386. It was an absolute bitch to configure, but I managed to get it running. I ran a few of the test programs, entered the commands in the order set out by the instructions, and watched in awe as the operating system performed a variety of diagnostics at blistering speed. My colleague's friend from the other side of the world, Linus Trovalds, had sent him what he called "LiNUX". Ah man, I wish I archived that email!"
We are past those types of concerns over Linux. The Cloud IS Linux.
Azure runs more Linux than Windows https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-a...
About the Google projects...they cannot do any project that they wont get bothered with.
As Linus said, we win when Microsoft starts developing for Linux...I am not dismissing the concerns, but the issues with Linux are not the corporations issues.
Are things like C vs Rust, Linus not considering Security bugs more important than other bugs and the complexity of the kernel that makes difficult to recruit new maintainers plus the fact that testing is outsourced to the distributions.
