Netflix CEO, Linus. Both are as relevant or more relevant than ever. Netflix is getting to be as big a force, in revenues and viewership, as any big cable company. Linux is very much still relevant in the server world and in the mobile and tablet computing world (android). And Linus' Git is growing in popularity (github?) and influence.
It's questionable whether the Vodaphone CEO is "relevant", but Vodaphone is definitely still a major competitor, they make more money than google and amazon combined.
Yes, plus Linus is relevant and important for both linux and git.
Git has been hugely, positively disruptive in a way no Dvcs was prior.
And anyone (cnn evidently) that thinks Linux developers are fungible misses the point of having a fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show. Great things can happen. He's the anti-steve jobs.
What gives you the idea he is missing aesthetic taste? You do realize that Linus (or any of the kernel devs) are not in any way responsible for the decisions groups like Gnome or KDE may make, right?
it sounds as if you didn't read the article. It doesn't say LinuX isn't still relevant - quite the opposite in fact - just that Linus has:
"Although he can claim credit for popularizing one of the most powerful ideas ever to sweep through the software industry, Torvalds's project has matured to such an extent that it's largely outgrown its illustrious creator."
I think it's fairly reasonable to say that Linux will continue on even if Linus disappeared. Same with git, for the matter.
The article was wrong re: Netflix, but the point they made - that Netflix didn't have a capable video over IP product at the time - was reasonable.
That does not make him irrelevant when he is still here. For example, the direction he "recently" gave to the arm branch (basically ordering everybody to clean up their shit immediately), will probably imply that Linux has been and will be more successful on portable devices. Would the same thing have happened without him? Maybe, or maybe not.
Assuming a cleanup is significant, yes, I'm fairly sure Google or another high-profile Linux contributor would have done the same. It's just maintenance work - necessary, but not industry changing like the initial release of GNU+Linux (as a complete OS) was.
"Revolutions" in the industry are often not the result of a big bang, but more frequently of mere accumulation of little steps. GNU+Linux has not changed anything in the industry when initially released. It was years (decades?) behind current techs at this time (but has fast taken leadership in many areas), and at first only used by hobbyist, then only used for applications with simple needs on simple hardware as a cost reduction measure, then used in more areas and so over.
And I'm far from sure that the decisions good for the long term development of Linux would be done by bigcorps if Linus went missing anyway (especially not Google). Bigcorps have bad habits (with high impedance mismatch in the context of the Linux project), like development behind closed doors, and not only time-to-the-market centered but even for some of them time-to-the-market weighting 95% in their choices. Because of that, bigcorps were the cause of the arm branch mess in the first place. Bigcorps often lead big projects that fails big. And Linux is not lead by bigcorps anyway, it's lead by peoples.
Also, the same argument could be applied to lot of people in leadership positions anyway. Maybe Apple would not be Apple without Steve Jobs, but the CEO does not matter more in lots of big companies than Linus matters for Linux. Maybe it would be very equivalent with somebody else, or maybe not, but in the meantime they are in charge, and when they do a good job, they are the ones who matter.
I'll argue that the true innovation of Linux was in the licensing, with both the development and adoption model this implied. Early Unix was distributed without a license (for numerous reasons). It rapidly spread throughout research and academic circles, but was constrained once software licensing emerged in the 1980s, and finally killed in the BSD wars of the 1990s.
It's not that Linus stumbled on some secret of technology or was smarter than anyone else doing 'Nix development. It's that he got obstructions out of the way that kept those who could contribute meaningfully from being able to do so and allowed others to utilize the results.
The end result is the innovation and technical superiority (by and large) of Linux over alternatives.
On how Unix initially emerged: there was no copyright of software (this changed in 1976), and AT&T were prohibited under a 1954 anti-trust consent decree from participating in computer equipment and software. So when Ritchie and Thompson created Unix, the company could do little but use it internally, and had no reason to prevent its more widespread distribution. Unix exists specifically because AT&T was prevented from productizing it.
I'm not sure Torvalds should be there, either. Sure, Linux long ago outgrew the need for him as chief evangelizer, but when Linus speaks, the software world's ears perk up. He's still incredibly influential, if no longer the Atlas of the FOSS movement (with apologies to Dr. Stallman).
To the average reader of CNN, git is a piece of software they've never heard of, much less understand why it's better. Linus never stopped being important to the software community, but git doesn't make him more important to the non-software community.
Github is more important than git so I guess that leaves figuring out how important linus or git was to the origin of github. Is here something about git specifically that made it more suitable for github than say mercurial or bazaar? Or was it timing or happenstance?
It's debatable whether github is more important than git or not. Despite the impression a reader of this site could have that (hype and with an user interface copy pasted from the prototype hype fashion simple user interface of the moment, with Big Buttons tm included) hosted services are the best thing since sliced bread and will replace everything, the world is interestingly neither centered around that, and it's indeed very ironic to value importance of centralized services more than the decentralized tool it embraces and extend, given many of the advances in the source code management area and development workflow directly come from the decentralized aspects.
That Hg also exist does not make git less important than github, no more than the fact that sourceforge exists make github less important than git.
While I happen to think the Github UI is quite nice, it's a minor aspect of Gihub's importance. Github basically invented "social coding" which I would argue has been a genuine phenomenon unmatched by BitBucket, Launchpad, et al (or Sourceforge). Git (and Mercurial) didn't offer substantial advancements over Bitkeeper (save licensing) and Git's popularity was solidified with it being chosen for Linux. While reasonable people may disagree on the merits of Git, Hg and Bazaar, it's difficult to put BitBucket and Launchpad in Github's circle.
While it may be ironic to value the importance of centralization on this topic, it's unwise to not to value it.
