Several people have asked me, in the context of my role of Open Source Evangelism at +HP Cloud Services , for my opinion of the recent article in Network World: "Does OpenStack need a Linus Torvalds?"
The some members of the tech press may want +OpenStack to have "a Linus", but I suspect that is because the press likes telling narratives about colorful quotable characters because those are easy pieces of content to write, and such stories sell copy.
The desire for an "authoritative voice" who can "make quick binding decisions", "instead of taking hours of deliberations" is little more than the standard unfortunate human misfeature of instinctively understanding and preferring autocratic alpha leaders.
Linus (and the various other "beloved dictators for life") are great people, and the open source world, and thus the world in general, is lucky to have them. But such singular and inspiring people in such singular and inspiring roles cannot be created on demand, and the failure modes and scaling issues of autocratic rule are too costly. If the press wants to talk about open source cloud computing that has an "authoritative voice" who can "make quick binding decisions", well, there is CloudStack and Eucalyptus, right there.
OpenStack is hardly the first project without a singular colorful press-friendly leader. The governance of the OpenStack project and the OpenStack foundation have been inspired by and drawn lessons learned from many such other projects than just Linux, such as the BSD, the Apache, and the Java communities.
I think we're off to a great start. And if the press wants a "voice" to go to about the goals and direction of OpenStack, the Foundation itself and each of it's member companies have a number of colorful and capable people who are more than happy to talk to them.
Including, for example, myself.