If I get hit by a bus, Linux will go on just fine says Linus Torvalds

Penguinista succession is secure, says Linux Lord

Just a few days after asking the Linux community to let him take a break, Linus Torvalds has said the project he kicked off 1991 can now get along without him.

He was, characteristically, blunt in his recent interview with Bloomberg, saying Linux would survive his death.

What he told the newswire's passenger-door-smeared Ashlee Vance is he's no longer the only person able to make key decisions about kernel submissions.

Fifteen years ago (when both the code base and the user base were considerably smaller, El Reg would observe), Torvalds reckons “people would have panicked,” but today “they'd work everything out in a couple of months”.

His confidence in others such as Greg Kroah-Hartman is such that he told Bloomberg there's “no concrete plan of action if I die”.

The job of keeping kernel development moving isn't so much about “technical know-how” these days, he said. Running the core of arguably the world's most important operating system is now about “being trusted and being available. Greg is the obvious number two. He could take it up, and then there are a couple of other people.”

Torvalds reiterated his intention to keep unloading f-bombs on fellow kernel devs, because his language happens in a “bigger context” and people are “better off” knowing how he feels.

Nor is he mellowing in his political attitudes: “I find people who think open-source is anti-capitalism to be kind of naive and slightly stupid,” he's reported to have said.

Which should get another flamewar with Richard “it's GNU/Linux” Stallman going nicely. Send popcorn. ®