Gaming: Linux Community Now Has A Succession Plan For When Linus Torvalds...

"In the absence of an agreed-upon process, the community would find itself playing Calvinball at an awkward time."

The Linux Foundation now has a succession plan for the day when Linux creator and main man Linus Torvalds either retires, or is no longer with us. The initiative came out of the Maintainers Summit held in December 2025, which ended with a session on continuity planning.

One thing I'll say about Linux people: they know how to get things done. This session resulted in broad agreement among the group about what a succession plan should look like, and an explicit plan for what to do next (which has now started).

A brief explainer of Torvalds' importance before we get into things. The Linux kernel development project has over 100 programmers each working to maintain and incorporate changes in their own repositories. But the final step in any Linux release is where all of this work is centralised and incorporated into the mainline repository: this has on almost every occasion been done by Torvalds.

The succession session was led by Dan Williams, principal engineer at Intel and Linux kernel maintainer, who got right into things by describing it as an uplifting subject linked to "our eventual march toward death," before offering to change the topic to Link tags if folk got upset. Williams noted that there has been a concern in the Linux community about what would happen if something unfortunate were to befall Torvalds, who is still a relatively spry 56 years old, with no succession plan in place.

The room discussed various options but, per LWN.net, "it is sufficient to say that there was not a lot of disagreement" before two things were agreed upon. The first was acknowledging that there are already some provisions in place, with multiple people being able to commit to Torvalds' repository, and redundancy measures in place for the stable repository.

The hoped-for scenario is that Torvalds will decide to step back, arrange a smooth transition to any replacement himself, and go off to enjoy a long retirement. Torvalds made it known he has no plans in this direction anytime soon, but why would he.

Then the big question: what if something goes wrong that does prevent this smooth transition, whether it's a freak skydiving incident or Bill Gates in the library with a candlestick. "As I put it in the discussion," writes LWN.net co-founder Jonathan Corbet, "in the absence of an agreed-upon process, the community would find itself playing Calvinball at

Source: PC Gamer