Story

For your distro to last, you need one of two approaches:

1. one dictator who's such a tough son-of-a-bitch that he not only can defy ordinary counting sequences but also survives mysterious illnesses that every doctor misdiagnoses.
2. lots of people, and a sufficiently robust community governance model to make any of them expendable.

The distros that have followed one of these models have outlasted every distro that hasn't.