Conway's Law absolutely applies to Linux. The trick is to remember that the communication patterns that Linux is optimized to reflect is "git tree pulls". Ov

Conway's Law absolutely applies to Linux. The trick is to remember that the communication patterns that Linux is optimized to reflect is "git tree pulls". Over time, things have been factored to minimize the amount of cross-tree merge conflicts. That way we can decentralize the development effort, and worry much less about conflicts when Linus has to pull from a hundred-odd git trees (many of which have sub-trees that were merged together by the subsystem maintainers before Linus then pulled them into his tree). But that is the primary communication pattern which is critical, and we have absolutely optimized how the code has been laid out to minimize communication difficulties --- when defined in terms of merge conflicts.