Founders aren't banished, they aren't in any gulag. They can carry on. If they produce something better, they are still the drivers.
A commentator below said, "remind me to make my own license with "I take it all down with me if you destroy me" clause....
That is explicitly _not_ and open source license.
The point is no one, neither the founders, nor any that may replace them, "take it all down with me".
You may get a fork, well then, may the best fork win.
A while back gcc was forked. Remember egcs? It was the best fork for awhile.
Then the fork merged again with gcc again.
Yup. It happens.
Life moves on.
Anyway, Linux has always been the under-dog. It was "statistically" much less likely to survive in the late-90s and early-00s.
In my personal opinion, Linux offers me the best desktop experience today.
I think I'm not in a bubble, I dabble with MacOS and Windows often. Linux feels liberating. It takes time to customize to one's preferences, but after that, it is smooth AF.
I don't even do that. I find the {mint, PopOS} defaults to be incredibly sane. I think I changed the background of mint. I'm always SO very confused when I need to use a MacOS or Windows machine.
That said, you can get the feeling out of the corner of your usage that something's gonna give. There has been painful transitionary stuff going on (remember X vs wayland? ifupdown vs networkmanager vs netplan? systemd? musl vs glibc?) that somehow the community papered over in a sane fashion for GP use, but when I was "sysadminnnig" stuff as an accessory to the stuff I was coding, it was loads of pain normalizing between different machines and moving from distro to distro. This could get even worse as stuff moves to containerized work, so the people most likely to complain due to bearing the most pain just stop caring.
It's currently dominant on phones and servers. Google can snap its fingers and set one of those on a course to drop toward zero over a few years, and is well-positioned to push Fuchsia for cloud-related server purposes if it so chooses, so that'll likely go too, if they decide to do that. AFAIK most Linux desktops are ChromeOS devices, and that's Google again.
That leaves traditional Linux desktop users, but if Fuchsia's GUI is any good and is well-integrated, and driver support is OK, those'll bleed to Fuchsia faster than they're replaced, too.
I can definitely see Google wanting to consolidate their codebase and switching all the consumer devices they maintain to Fuchsia sooner or later.
As a part time Linux desktop user since ~2002, I don't think other traditional linux desktop users would bleed to Fuchsia. I could see some people switching from macOS to Fuchsia though.
But I actually don't think this will happen with Fuchsia and I expect to just deal with the problems of Linux for another 20 years. Oh well.
In any case, given Google's lack of attention span, I suspect Linux will still be going strong another 4-5 new OS's from Google down the road.
Like, I get that there is an aspect of founder worship on this forum but there is no inherent value in this beyond the idea that someone can keep control indefinitely, which doesn't matter for an open source project. Maybe it matters if you want to hang onto your company's bank accounts but that's a fundamentally different thing compared to a project that exists entirely on public github.
Kicking out stupid people may be all good and dandy, but I'm very wary of the people who are harsh proponents of the kicking, whom they represent, and what they stand for.
Oh, and what/whom they suggest the "stupid" leader X should be replaced with. Usually their thinking doesn't go that far.
The usual pattern I see is: employees at large corporations attacking people who don't have a big corporate affiliation. This may not mean much, but it makes me start thinking about this big picture.
And then, I haven't yet seen an open source project where the long-time leader went away because of burnout of some kind or was kicked out, and it started growing, prospering, and kicking ass in general (Python doesn't count, since Guido never really went away). I've seen stagnation at best, and disuse, lack of maintenance, and a fall into obscurity in the vast majority of cases. In other words, there is not enough laissez-faire in "the community" at large to keep the tragedy of commons at bay.
That's interesting because on this forum I have seen quite a lot of the exact opposite: employees at startups attacking big corporation employees, seemingly because they (incorrectly) perceive them as their competitors. In fact any time Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft seems to get brought up here in an article there is a barrage of negative comments and airing of grievances out of the blue. Honestly to me this is all just shades of the same open source drama, it really doesn't matter in the end who stands for what or represents what. Some people just won't get along and that's what the community has to deal with. When it's a prominent founder causing issues, then it becomes a problem for everyone.
But let's not conflate a value judgement with a prediction: When it happens all at once it says that there's either something wrong with the zeitgeist or something wrong with the leadership, or something anyways which is a leading indicator of the end.
If the US ever wants to keep some of their liberties they need to break up Google.
For Europe, we need to build our own web platforms without the American big tech.
But who/what is the attack vector? Is it a coordinated attack and if so, what is the method and who are the backers? Are there other founders included in this trend? Granted, those three are pretty big but ...
Linus was banished?
Most likely I will even be gone first, but still like most companies, it won't survive a couple of generation changes at the commanding wheel.
- Founders banished
- Community in shambles
- Companies losing Linux focus
- Core system components reaching sustainability
- Google building replacement
- Statistically unlikely to stay active much longer