I get that Linus is a superhero, but it’s still so weird to me that this vital piece of the world’s infrastructure relies on one man.
I think its better to think of it like a president or prime minister. He might set the plan and direction and making the big decisions, but there are thousands of others supporting and making the plan actually happen.
In the past he has delegated the release to others as well.
So if the worst would happen, the linux project would continue operating fairly seamlessly.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2347/
It is a small bunch of people though.
It’s also mind blowing to consider that as many other projects, both Linux and Python started as a hobyist project never meant to do more than cater to some personal needs.
This taught me how important is allocating time for your team for their personal projects, as the next school romance anime tagging system could be the cornerstone of every AI in the future.
Except 99.999% of personal projects won’t be that popular and allocating time for personal projects is a waste in that regard. Basically you’d be playing lottery and not get anything out of it.
There’s plenty of reasons to encourage personal projects, but this isn’t one of them.
Lol, downvote this guy for pointing out that it might not make sense for your company to pay for your personal projects
Maybe because it’s a wise investment to encourage knowledge workers gain additional experience working on things they enjoy even if you might not be able to pick up one of those things and directly make another revenue stream out of it.
I didn’t, but I get why. It’s a specious argument — it doesn’t matter if 99% of them are useless. It matters if the 1% that become ubiquitous for whatever reason provide utility that makes the useless ones worth it.
Yeah you can run a company that never provides any time or resources to tinker, but only if you’re okay with innovation never happening again.
