Why can't the Bitcoin development be more like Linux?
Linux has a huge development team. So many people take part in updating it. If you run Linux on your computer, you will know there are always updates. All these updates are created by the open source community. So why can't Bitcoin development be more like Linux?
What are we missing? Or maybe the development team will grow as big as the team of Linux?
Linux developers deal with a shared code, but not shared data (whatever is inside the computers running Linux).
Bitcoin developers deal with shared code and shared data (blockchain). You can modify and extend Bitcoind as much as you want, but other Bitcoind nodes would reject your custom transactions. Thus, room for experimenting development ideas easily is smaller as you are still bound to global Bitcoin protocol rules.
And then altcoins were born.