People fear the same thing about Valve.

One wrong person and we could all end up in the same money milk machine as EA.

I know people complain about Linus hurling insults at merge requests, but his rigidness is what keeps the kernel viable. If it weren’t for him, google would have already shit all over it with a mega fork and essentially cornered the market like they did with Android and HTTP3.

Both are technically “open source”, yet Google essentially dictates what they want or need for their economic purpose, like ignoring JPEGXL, forcing AVIF, making browsers bloaty, using manifestv3, etc. Android is even worse and may as well be considered separate from Linux because it’s just google’s walled garden running on the linux kernel.

He is open to new technology, but he understands the fundamental effects of design choices and will fight people over it to prevent the project from fracturing due to feature breaking changes, especially involving userspace.