I personally know a dozen people who could have written the Linux kernel, at around the time Linus wrote it. What none of them could have done, through, is manage the project when it took off the way Linus did.
I suspect 100 years from now, the place you will hear the name "Linus Torvalds" the most will be in management classes in business and engineering school. His actual software will be a footnote, merely the platform upon which he demonstrated how to manage a large open source project. Kind of like Henry Ford and the automobile--Ford made important contributions to the development of the automobile itself, but it is his figuring out how to make the automobile factory that is the main thing we remember him for.
I suspect 100 years from now, the place you will hear the name "Linus Torvalds" the most will be in management classes in business and engineering school. His actual software will be a footnote, merely the platform upon which he demonstrated how to manage a large open source project. Kind of like Henry Ford and the automobile--Ford made important contributions to the development of the automobile itself, but it is his figuring out how to make the automobile factory that is the main thing we remember him for.