With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.

Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.