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.

Not necessarily, there are plenty of examples where earlier success did not lead to future success. A recent example that comes to mind is CloudKitchens? I could be wrong about CK, so happy to learn differently.

>there are plenty of examples where earlier success did not lead to future success

Unless there are more examples of that than of a lack of prior success not leading to future success, it doesn't seem like counterevidence.

I am not sure why you're stipulating that there needs to be a threshold of minimal examples to present a contradictory pov, or why you need those counter examples to be greater in number. Most mammals don't have bills, but platypuses exist. Should we not describe a paltypus as a mammal simply because there are not enough examples of this type of animal? Or maybe I misunderstand your point.

Because the parent didn't say "prior success guarantees future success".

Yes, they said "more likely", so I think what I said still works because just because you were successful in the past doesn't mean you're more likely to succeed in the future in all circumstances, i.e., if you extrapolate an infinite number of scenarios then your likelihood of success doesn't remain constant in each and every single one of them. If that were the case, then we wouldn't have Lehman brothers or Polanski (filmaker) or SBF.