It's also unnerving that there are huge projects (not just Linux) and huge operating systems that have sections that are "Subsystem maintainer/author or nobody." Open source projects get volunteers because volunteers find the work interesting and some esoteric parts can have very, very few people working on them. I don't really have a solution to this, but it's to be expected.

I don't think that it means that if Torvalds gets shot tomorrow that the Linux kernel will die. I think that what it means is that there are parts that only he is knowledgeable or invested in enough work on in order to fix certain bugs. That is, if he were to die tomorrow, other would be able to take his place, technically, but they would have to spend a while reverse engineering the code and might even make significant changes to suit there tastes.

This happens all the time with commercial products.

Good point. When code is too hard to understand, open source is an illusion.

Open Source is an 'illusion' most of the time. What open source gives you, is the possibility that someone could understand and take over the source if it's needed badly enough.

Open source is like open laws, so bloody vast it takes people who you have to pay vast sums of money to spend the time to interpret and advise you on it. So you don't have to spend the vast amount of time to use it.

Interesting analogy. And still better than closed laws.