The saga of Git: Lightning does strike twice

"Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure: Linus Torvalds. These episodes usually manifest themselves as concerns about the scalability of said individual – whether he can continue to oversee and manage the amazing distributed development model as it grows ever bigger and more ambitious. To counter those fears it is probably worth looking at what happened as a result of the first – and by far the most frightening - "Linus does not scale" episode, not least because it led to multiple positive outcomes.

"Things began innocently enough, when, on 28 September 1998, somebody asked on the Linux kernel mailing list:

"Am I the only one for whom 2.1.123 fbcon.c doesn't compile?"

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