For those unaware, Christop Hellwig is the Linux maintainer who tried to block Rust bindings for DMA.
Good. This makes room for innovation.
oh wow, no one is left from that disagreement, they both resigned.
Sort of. The person that made the initial commit is not the one that quit (Rust side).
Honestly I kind of want Linus to step down too. He’s been slowly moving away for a long time already. It might be time for a new primary maintainer to step up.
I really really don’t. As soon as he does, corporate vultures (such as MBA degree holders) and people who “want to change what ‘open source’ means” will swoop in. If we replace Linus, I hope its someone very similar to him who isn’t afraid to be a hardass where it’s needed and will keep the current vision of Linux alive.
As long as good actors can still do good work in a fork of Linux then hopefully it’s resistant to corporate vultures.
If Linus is the only person keeping Linux from descending into corporate enshittification then the project is critically vulnerable already.
What if Linus steps back for personal reasons? What if he falls ill? What if a family member falls ill? What if he’s ousted within the foundation? Linux cannot afford to have Linus being a single point of failure.
Such is the problem with dictators in any situation. A benevolent dictator might be one of the most productive ways to run a project, but at some point there has to be a successor. Even a mildly-less-benevolent dictator could cause a lot of damage. Linux needs a governance structure with checks and balances even if it means slower decision making; it’s too important to let fall into the wrong hands.
Linus already has a backup. Its Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Let Linus see through the Rust inclusion in Linux. I dont think it will go well without him. He is well respected in the Linux community so people are more willing to compromise with him.
Hellwig was a bit crusty about being overruled by Torvalds, it seems.
Good that there’s a maintainer in place, too. Sad that it came to this, but perhaps it’s time to pass the torch.
Just proves to me that this should’ve gone to remediation so much earlier. Losing three important contributors to the Kernel, because people were scared of involving the Code of Conduct Committee from the start, is a shit sandwich, regardless of whoever you want to blame for this.
I’m not gonna lose sleep over his departure but the Linux foundation could do a lot to improve the professionalism of the project instead of dumping money on chasing AI.
I hate that it came to this, after so many Rust devs left, but all I can say is “Good.”
