Greg Kroah-Hartman, a prominent Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow, believes that the answer is no. Speaking to the How Software Is Built blog, Kroah-Hartman makes the case that the pace of Linux development leaves competition in the dust:

Here are some of his point:

[The Linux kernel development team] adds 11,000 lines, remove[s] 5,500 lines, and modif[ies] 2,200 lines [of code] every single day.

People ask whether we can keep that up, and I have to tell you that every single year, I say there's no way we can go any faster than this. And then we do. We keep growing, and I don't see that slowing down at all anywhere.

I mean, the giant server guys love us, the embedded guys love us, and there are entire processor families that only run Linux, so they rely on us. The fact that we're out there everywhere in the world these days is actually pretty scary, From an engineering standpoint. And even at that rate of change, we maintain a stable kernel.”

It's something that no one company can keep up with. It would actually be impossible at this point to create an operating system to compete against us. You can't sustain that rate of change on your own.

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