@Fou_ad see blog post. no, a fork requires considerable infra to maintain the fork.

@joriki @davidgerard A fork that sticks would need a major corporation behind it, and all the major corporations are all in on the AI kool-aid.

It didn't happen before AI when there was still plenty of reason to do it due to chronic community issues and a looming sustainability crisis, and it won't happen now. Nor Linus being forced out. He's made sure to surround himself with people who are either entirely on his side, have roughly the same values as him, or have no drive nor desire to stand up to him.

Major corps already maintain forks internally and some might choose to hard fork for other reasons, but there is no chance of one of them signing up to create or back a new community project around such a fork.

@endrift @davidgerard I'm starting to wonder if, like, a small team who knows what they're doing LLM-coding (not vibe coding) a viable bootstrap Rust kernel is what the world needs to obsolete Linux. With a goal of dropping LLM use entirely, somehow, as the community grows.

I despise LLMs but I despise the state of things around the Linux community even more. Before LLMs I used to think the only way this would happen is if one or more companies massively invest in it... which doesn't seem to be happening. I'd be willing to hold my nose on the LLMs if it means the Linux mess has a way out...

Probably wouldn't work because LLMs are too addictive for that kind of plan to work out but... sigh, I'm just so tired of everything.

@daemonspudguy @davidgerard The bots are demonstrably useful for some things when driven by people who are experienced, when you ignore the ethics and cost trainwreck that they are.

The people in charge are too shallow to see the big picture, they only care about how shiny it is to make working on a codebase full of technical debt a bit better (despite all that technical debt being their own fault due to mismanaging the project).

I fully believe Linus was able to use an LLM productively, in a technical way. I also think the kernel outgrew his ability and suitability to lead the project a good decade ago, maybe two... mostly for non technical reasons.

And so this happens.

@daemonspudguy @davidgerard

I can see several plausible scenarios:

1) He doesn’t touch the code anymore
2) rubs shoulders with too many impotent people
3) Libertarian brainrot has set in and he’s become tech bro adjacent. This is a variant on number two