First of all, it’s been a while since it’s no longer his code, and the contributions from whatever amount of people must be respected. That was used some time back as justification to never moving to GPL3 or latest.

Second, there’s now a huge foundation behind it. Although he has gating approval for whatever he wants, the money coming from big enterprises would cease. Remember now MS already claims it loves linux.

Third, although it’s pretty linked to second, the project is not an independent community project anymore. Even risc-v people took care not to create a so nation specific project (even though its origins are totally linked to the academy from a particular one), that it doesn’t matter which country imposes sanctions to others, no country can prevent another from using its open ISA to build their own stuff. Linux, and its linux foundation failed on this, and as it’s pretty dependent on the big tech and enterprise, now it has no options to be compliant. Which you could see recently from banning developers and the legal reasons involved (well done, as risc-v, that would have had minimal impact, or better yet, if a community project not linked to any country, then that would have gone differently).

All in all, linux’s success has lead it to be a non community driven, non independent project, and I would guess the enterprise and big tech, which is pretty reliant on linux now a days, wouldn’t let linux go away unless they already have an alternative.

Though never say never right? But my take on this is both, no single person owns linux, so no single person can take it away, and there’s too much reliance on it from big tech and enterprises as to let such important project, and key on their software supply chain (years back thinking on software supply chain was in no one’s mind) or so they say.