It's pretty hard to keep the design open once the whole architecture is bigger than what a single programmer can keep track of. Say, the Linux kernel. The overa

It's pretty hard to keep the design open once the whole architecture is bigger than what a single programmer can keep track of. Say, the Linux kernel. The overall architecture is fixed, there's no way around it. At that point, splitting into components that are maintained separately does no harm. AFAIK the Linux kernel is maintained like that already in practice, even if it's a single repo.