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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- If something happens to Linus Torvalds, there’s now a succession plan.
- Rather than naming a successor, the plan describes a process for selecting successors.
- However, Torvalds has no plans to retire.
After more than three decades in the Linux driver’s seat, Linus Torvalds will one day step away from his role as gatekeeper of the Linux kernel. We’ve always known that, of course, but the open-source project is no longer gambling on that scenario. The core kernel community has formally drafted a project‑continuity plan outlining how it would replace Torvalds as the top‑level maintainer if something were to happen to him or if he were to retire.
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Mind you, when I asked him just now if he had any retirement plans — my own plan is to fall over gracefully onto my keyboard — he replied, “My plan seems to just be ‘I will live forever.'”
More pragmatically following the “Happy wife, happy life” principle, he added, “Perhaps equally importantly, my wife doesn’t want to be pestered by a bored husband.” I can’t argue with that.
The new “plan for a plan,” drafted by longtime kernel contributor Dan Williams, was discussed at the latest Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit in Tokyo, where he introduced it as “an uplifting subject tied to our eventual march toward death.”
No single heir is identified
Torvalds added, in our conversation, that “part of the reason it came up this time around was that my previous contract with Linux Foundation ended Q3 last year, and people on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board had been aware of that. Of course, they were also aware that we’d renewed the contract, but it meant that it had been discussed.”
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The plan stops short of naming a single heir. Instead, it creates an explicit process for selecting one or more maintainers to take over the top‑level Linux repository in a worst‑case or orderly‑transition scenario, including convening a conclave to weigh options and maximize long‑term project health. One maintainer in Tokyo jokingly suggested that the group, like the conclave that selects a new pope, be locked in a room and that a puff of white smoke be sent out when a decision was reached.
The document frames this as a way to protect against the classic “bus factor” problem. That is, what happens to a project if its leader is hit by a bus? Torvalds’ central role today means the project currently assumes a bus‑factor of one, where a single person’s exit could, in theory, destabilize merges and final releases. In practice, as Torvalds and other top maintainers have discussed, the job of top penguin would almost certainly currently go to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable-branch Linux kernel maintainer.
Torvalds and his friend Dirk Hohndel, head of Verizon Open Source, discussed the matter in 2024. Hohndel noted that “to be the king of Linux, the main maintainer, you have to have a lot of experience. And the backup right now is Greg KH, who is about the same age as we are and has even less hair.”
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Torvalds responded, “But the thing is, Greg hasn’t always been Greg. Before Greg, there was Andrew Morton and Alan Cox. After Greg, there will be Shannon and Steve. The real issue is you have to have a person or a group of people that the development community can trust, and part of trust is fundamentally about having been around for long enough that people know how you work, but long enough does not mean to be 30 years.”
Kroah-Hartman has stepped in on an interim basis before. He served as the head of Linux when Torvalds briefly stepped away from kernel work in 2018 to improve how he treated other developers and maintainers. However, Kroah‑Hartman is older than Torvalds.
Multiple trusted developers
As a result, people have suggested that, instead of replacing Torvalds with another Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), the top‑level maintainer role be distributed among multiple trusted developers.
At age 56 and still the final arbiter on virtually every change that lands in torvalds/linux.git, Torvalds has often joked that Linux’s inner circle is “getting gray and old.” That sentiment has grown more urgent as the project has struggled with maintainer fatigue and with recruiting younger contributors into core subsystem leadership roles.
Also: Even Linus Torvalds is vibe coding now
There is no expectation that Torvalds will step aside anytime soon. He remains firmly in place as the overseer of mainline development. He’ll stay in that job until he can’t do it anymore. But, at least now, the ultimate “Linus‑dependency” problem has a process in place to patch it come the day it’s needed.
