Sure, any given feature may be developed by a single company in a central location. But in aggregate, IIUC, Linux kernel development is decentralized. It's not

Sure, any given feature may be developed by a single company in a central location. But in aggregate, IIUC, Linux kernel development is decentralized. It's not like a proprietary OS such as Windows, where feature development happens top-down (including the decisions about which features get developed in which office). For example, recall that the hypervisor built into the Linux kernel, KVM, was originally developed and contributed by a little company in Israel (before they got bought by Red Hat). They needed a hypervisor for their desktop virtualization product, so they developed it and contributed it. It wasn't part of any grand top-down strategy for the Linux OS. IMO, that's the key difference.