The human effort

The kernel started with just one software engineer, Linus Torvalds, who’s still in charge of the whole operation. But as he’s said many times before, if he were to be hit by a bus the kernel would still keep being developed. It’s worth checking out an analysis of this statement with the fine example of Y2k humour at www.crummy.com/ writing/segfault.org/Bus.html ,

Torvalds’ day-to-day work is more signing out patches than writing critical functions, and the cadre of subsystem maintainers would be able to manage things if he were to suddenly stop contributing to Linux. So the so-called Bus Factor isn’t really a problem for the kernel so much as it is for smaller projects.

The first version of Linux, 0.01, comprised 10,239 lines and 88 files. Today the kernel