We live in a society of hierarchies, organizations, and structures. Rules are hard and fast. Everything has a proper place. This is especially true of the computing community, no doubt because computers themselves are highly structured, deterministic beasts. Large software development corporations employ scores of programmers into hierarchies so deep that the lowest-level employees are often lost in the carpeting.
Hierarchies can be real, virtual, or purely imaginary.
Well, almost nothing. The Linux development community is a seemingly unstructured, amorphous conglomerate. There is no single leader, or nucleus, for the organization. No single entity can claim responsibility for Linux. Each of the many parts of the Linux system, from individual kernel source files to entire distributions, are copyrighted by different individuals.