i don't see that many people with more than one contribution that have the caliber of linux. so to me it looks like that when the first big contribution is wildly successful, then they will stick working on that and not start other projects.
possibly one of the reasons why git could be successful is that linus quickly handed over development to someone else.
of the top of my head i can only think of a few people that created multiple wildly successful projects. donald knuth with his books and with TeX (and i am not sure if the books are considered wildly successful). richard stallman with emacs and gcc (and the GNU licenses), anders hejlsberg with turbo pascal, c# and maybe typescript.
if you look at everyone else, they usually have only one wildly successful project that they are known for.
here is a list of programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers
most there only have one project that is widely known. if they have multiple projects then most of those are smaller.
possibly one of the reasons why git could be successful is that linus quickly handed over development to someone else.
of the top of my head i can only think of a few people that created multiple wildly successful projects. donald knuth with his books and with TeX (and i am not sure if the books are considered wildly successful). richard stallman with emacs and gcc (and the GNU licenses), anders hejlsberg with turbo pascal, c# and maybe typescript.
if you look at everyone else, they usually have only one wildly successful project that they are known for.
here is a list of programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers most there only have one project that is widely known. if they have multiple projects then most of those are smaller.