For that matter, why should Red Hat fund development on the sorts of thing that Alan Cox works on, if hardware vendors are willing to fund it? Intel can even get developers internal documentation and (most importantly) face time with hardware designers who can explain things that they didn't think to document (or that they documented in a huge specification that's too big to find the little detail in).

There's no reason for Red Hat to have a collection of kernel developers working on stuff that Red Hat doesn't need more than anybody else does.

I think you're missing the fact that the Wiimote is sufficiently different from other systems' controllers that most games released for both of them will be terrible on one or the other. Trying to sell to the massive Wii install base isn't going to be easy if you're trying to compete with games that are less awkward and more fun on the Wii.

On the other hand, there's no reason there couldn't be a good Wii GTA, except that it would be much more disturbing than other console versions. In ordinary GTA games, your character does all sorts of bad things while you sit around pushing buttons on a controller. In a proper Wii version, you'd be miming doing the bad things yourself, which will seem a whole lot worse.

I'd actually say that the US needs a CTO, who would be responsible for identifying the most promising technologies to subsidize the development of. Someone who can look at the range of technologies that are under development, and decide whether it makes sense to go for more efficient production of renewable hydrocarbon fuels for cars and fuel-efficient hybrids, or whether we'd do better to produce more electricity in the midwest, transport it as compressed hydrogen gas, turn it back into electricity in the high-population areas, and drive plug-in electrics. And are we going to use enough more oil to make it worthwhile to put research into cleaner and safer processing, or should we focus on not using it in the first place? OSHA, the EPA, and the DoE each have their own priorities, and there isn't anyone in the position to find a balance between them and get useful things done.

On the other hand, the government needs someone to fix the government's information technology problems, which is an entirely different job, and seems to be what Obama's looking for. I'm not sure why this post isn't called "Secretary of Information Technology", actually, which would be more in line with other executive branch government posts and distinguish clearly between the two possible job descriptions.