Nobody is immune to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or fatal heart failure – not even Linus Torvalds, who still has the final say in the development of the kernel he named Linux. This worries many, as there is no public record of who or what would take over leadership in case of an emergency.
Archive link: https://archive.is/mZQg2
Doubt it since BSD is missing a ton if features Linux has
Features can be migrated (wasn’t that the whole point of POSIX? And GNU?).
At least it has a properly designed kernel, instead of some student’s monolithic toy project, bloated beyond any semblance of maintainability.
Once Torvalds is gone Linux will inevitably fracture (more). With no one with historical authority to settle disputes every distribution will end up maintaining its own version of the kernel, which will eventually become mutually incompatible.
This incompatibility will cause most distributions that stick to the remnants of the Linux kernel to be abandoned, with only the largest and commercial ones surviving, and eventually becoming closed source blobs enshittified beyond any semblance of usability.
Any distribution willing to survive and remain open source will have to migrate to a new, more stable kernel, and barring the emergence of HURD as an actually useable one BSD will be the only available option (and a much saner one at that).