What's wrong with branches and folders? Why are upstream repositories needed? (My hunch is the answer is just "it's slow with that much code" to which I again say "not when GVFS is ready").
Not to say Linux should change their ways, just that I wouldn't adopt them as part of a company.
You can do kernel development with a "we give commit access out fairly freely" model, of course (I think some of the BSDs are like that, again as historical accident of the cvs style tooling they used to use); but Linux hasn't historically been socially organised that way, and changing tools is easier than changing organisational structure.
It does. It's pretty easy to have specific branches with specific permissions.
But then I realized that the advantage of multiple repos is that it is decentralized: anyone can start their own fork, and collaboration works similar to the official forks, and you don’t need any centralized administration.
Having everyone share a single giant monorepo sounds like you’ll need a lot of people to support the infrastructure. Microsoft can do that. Can the Linux community?
With a huge monorepo, you can easily archive everyones contributions. That’s probably important for Microsoft. It’s not important for Linus — he only cares about the stuff he merges.
Finally, multiple repos allow people to work on stuff privately, and only contribute back to the public when they are ready.
So they should base their decisions on the eventuality of some project being ready?