I get the impression (or maybe this is the point and I'm just dense) that the article is saying that Linus's aggressiveness matched corporate aggressiveness head-to-head, and that this meant Linux didn't get engulfed by corporate agenda to the extent that it lost its core integrity and values.

I also think I'm reading the notion that perhaps Linus' apology and temporary stepping-down to reflect introduces hesitancy about the authority/legitimacy/validity of his position and views.

Maybe so. I don't think this will have a negative impact on Linux itself though. For all the chaos it's wrought, the GPLv2 kind of saves things somewhat here; even if Linus steps down, we'll be fine: the whole world is Linux-specific, and while Linux is just a syscall interface it's also a rather important thing that initializes and maintains the state of your hardware and peripherals for you, and this rather important thing happens to be under this license that doesn't let you proprietary-ify it in certain ways.

This is awesome.

Until someone makes a perfectly Linux-compatible kernel with a different license model.

The idea makes sense. Notwithstanding whatever ideas you might associate with Lennart Poettering, I remember him saying (although I can't find it right now...) that Linux is pretty much the future and that nothing else (translation: BSD) really matters. I think this was regarding GNOME and/or systemd BSD support. Some may think FreeBSD (at least) might want to have a word with Lennart, but still...

So far Microsoft have a partially complete UNIX^HLinux reimplementation. Honestly quite an amazing 360° there... they currently seem to be trying to lure "modern developers" to Azure. I can't say I quite get the rationale there, but okay, cool. (Not dissing it, I genuinely don't "get" it.)

FreeBSD's quiet use in things like the PlayStation 4 is similar to MINIX's use in Intel CPUs: the fact that it's a UNIX is a throwaway implementation detail. Linux is completely different - compatibility encapsulates everything from the syscall table to the location of specific files, to the existence of /proc, /sys and similar, to the fact that graphics and windowing are (for now...) X11 based, to the fact that the shell works the way it does (read: that the shell uses the GNU coreutils).

Google decided to avoid the UNIX thing altogether, instead opting to create their own new thing. This makes sense: Google have server-side, client-side, and everything in between to think about, and it's going to simplify a lot of subsystems, infrastructure, tooling, design, architecture, etc, if they can hand the same kernel to wearable device OEMs, phone/tablet OEMs, server OEMs, IoT device OEMs, "nonexistent"/internal network equipment OEMs, consumer network device OEMs; etc etc. This is a stretch and perhaps I'm looking ahead more ambitiously than Google is here, but I'd be _very_ surprised if this concept hasn't been floated. It's too attractive and makes too much sense.

I've been scared about Linux's future for a long time. It feels... too successful, like things are going suspiciously well. I mean, right now I'm typing this on a machine running an OS I didn't have to pay anybody for, and if something breaks and makes me mad enough to want to do something about it, there's more things I can take apart and things I can open and shut that will fit in my attention span. And here's the bit that I'm suspicious about: that's the status quo, what we've come to expect. We have it ridiculously easy!

I guess the reason I'm suspicious is because, I'm afraid the nice status quo changing isn't a matter of if but when, and when things fall apart, I don't want to be taken by surprise.

It would be utterly foolish for me to try to envisage how this would happen; the bazaar is WAY too big, sociopolitically speaking, for me to mentally model it. Nope. But I feel (hand-wavily) that something's gotta give, eventually. Not because of some concept of "where on earth is the fuel for all of this free stuff coming from, and when will it run out" but more in terms of the integrity of the fabric holding everything together, and how vulnerable that is to change.