Going a bit OT, but what do you think makes these minds so rare? They're obviously pretty smart, maybe even very smart - you have to be smart enough in order to become so accomplished after all - but I wonder whether people don't often simply mistake accomplishment with brilliance. I'm pretty sure you could find other people who, being in the right place at the right time and with enough endurance, would be able to fill their shoes. You can't become as accomplished as Torvalds is by simply repeating what he did with Linux since 1991, but today; that niche's already taken, Torvalds 2.0 would be just one of many kernel devs now and their own version control system wouldn't even have an advantage of being used by Linux.
Going a bit OT, but what do you think makes these minds so rare? They're obviously pretty smart, maybe even very smart - you have to be smart enough in order to become so accomplished after all - but I wonder whether people don't often simply mistake accomplishment with brilliance. I'm pretty sure you could find other people who, being in the right place at the right time and with enough endurance, would be able to fill their shoes. You can't become as accomplished as Torvalds is by simply repeating what he did with Linux since 1991, but today; that niche's already taken, Torvalds 2.0 would be just one of many kernel devs now and their own version control system wouldn't even have an advantage of being used by Linux.