Leslie Hawthorne posted an interested thread to the Google Summer of Code Student's List regarding the Bus Factor and the related Single point of failure.It presents a large problem in FOSS development.

She posed the following questions:

1) Do you see the bus factor as a problem in Open Source in general?
How about for your project?

2) Do you think that the bottlenecks result from having too few people
involved in a project? How do those bottlenecks get resolved if it is
hard to bring on newcomers due to bottlenecks?

3) What parallels can you draw between the concept of the bus factor,
socially speaking, and reliability engineering?

The best example of how it is a problem in open source can be explained by the saga of Hans Reiser, whom everybody knows killed his wife. He is the lead developer on ReiserFS. Now with him in prison, there is a good chance that ReiserFS will now slowly die due to his incarceration.

Imagine for a moment if you will, that Linus Torvalds got hit by a bus or something related to that. What would happen to the Linux Kernel? Well, it would probably not die, but it would be a HUGE hit since he is the one who leads the development. Would it die? Probably not. The Bus Factor for linux is pretty low.

As for my Summer of Code project, the Bus Factor would be high. Since I am the primary developer.

Applying this socially, every organization is ultimately led by the vision of one person, and usually there are safeties in place to prevent the Bus Factor from even becoming an issue. So this really can't be applied socially in my opinion. BUT if Google were eliminated, Summer of Code would cease to exist. So I suppose it could be applied.

The success and potential failure is usually dependent on one person (or a select few in some cases). Again, referencing Hans Reiser, his project will now most likely fail, may not; but the probability is high. This is the same across all industries.

Now, does anybody else have answers regarding this topic?