Nobody is immune to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or fatal heart failure – not even Linus Torvalds, who still has the final say in the development of the kernel he named Linux. This worries many, as there is no public record of who or what would take over leadership in case of an emergency.
Archive link: https://archive.is/mZQg2
They technically already did this with Android which all ship custom kernels and closed source driver blobs.
Of which Google successfully lobbied the government to keep foreign competition out, which has lead to the soft death of AOSP as everyone else has forked into a new OS or accepts google’s terms to use their gapps suite.
Best thing about Linus is that he immediately tells these megacorps to f off every time they make a PR with even a remotely questionable purpose.
If they really want to achieve something technical without scrutiny, there’s FreeBSD right there. Implement it and make a future PR if it actually improves something.
Otherwise, critical choices within the Linux kernel will affect everyone, and could very easily lead to abuse without any proper moderation.
Google already has a hit order out on JPEGXL simply because they know that AVIF will save them on cloud storage cost, so they’ve effectively banned it from the browser space since they own Chrome and have enough leverage over Firefox.