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Torvalds Tells All
Eugenia writes: "Linus Torvalds gives an interesting interview to OSNews.com, talking about everything people are wondering about his personal opinions on several matters: on the GNU/Linux naming, the GUIs currently offered for Linux, the kernel 2.6, his plans for hot-plugged devices & drivers, Microsoft, FreeBSD and the future in general."
(emphasis added)
Now that has GOT to hurt. The guy that tons of geeks look up to (rightly or wrongly), has just said that he doesn't really give a rats ass about what one of the Big Names keeps going on about.... Definately not what anyone in a philosophical debate wants to hear - people loving your idea is great, people loathing your idea is still something you can work with, but disregard? Ouch.
It seems to me that the more interviews I see from Linus, the more tired he sounds, or is exasperated a better word, anyone else noticing this? I think everyone in the UNIX community would like to see real answers to the questions in regards to .NET, and "competing" softwares. He even dodged the "Where do you see Linux in 5 to 10 years" question. Maybe he took some advise from Steve Jobs and decided not to be a preacher. :)
Meanwhile, in an RMS office somewhere:
"Okay, so Windows 2001 it is then."
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
I get a picture of Linus taking his cue from Chunk, and telling everything.
"And then, when I was in 4th grade, I pushed my sister down the stairs and blamed it on the dog.
But this, this was the worst. I mixed up a batch of fake puke, and snuck it into the movies. I went up into the balcony...."
Now that would be a great interview.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Then along comes a guy who doesn't care if anybody adopts his pet project -- which is now the used by a huge number of people all across the planet, and the basis of billions of dollars in development and sales efforts. Hardly fair, is it? ;)
What if there is no "competition"?
Competition between MS and Linux is an invention of the markets, not a feature of the kernel's existence. At least, I think Linus is right if he thinks as much.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Back in '92 when I first started working with Linux it was kind of cool. You could do things on your home computer that before were not very possible, or very expensive.
It was just kind of cool, and fun.
Then sometime in '97, shortly after the OS/2 regime was destroyed, Linux took on this holy jihad. Now it was a battle, it wasn't just good enough to create something kind of fun and geeky, the goal was to destroy all the infidels from Microsoft.
It was at that point that Linux became no fun to use, and it was no longer fun to be around the Linux geeks.
Linus has the right attitude. There is no enemy.
[yawn] I'm so sick of people quoting "The Art of War" and "On War" and "The Book of Five Rings" and other military classics in reference to software development. First of all, as several other posters have pointed out, L.T. sees himself primarily as a programmer, not a businessman -- he doesn't define other OS'es as "the enemy" and therefore doesn't worry about ancient military wisdom. Second, and perhaps more important, even more business-oriented programmers are fools if they think military advice translates to any business, especially software. No matter what the Japanese say, business _isn't_ war.
Whatever happend to that fabled Japanese "business is war" economy, anyway? Oh, that's right -- all those warrior businessmen had a couple of decades of success with their slash'n'burn tactics, then kept going with it and drove one of the world's largest economies straight into the toilet.
There's a lesson here, one which Microsoft and Oracle and Sun should learn really fast: war is about killing people and breaking things, and business (ideally) is about empowering people and building a stable, lasting structure to create good products. These are not only different goals, they're opposite and mutually incompatible goals, and techniques that work for one simply _do not work_ for the other.
I've seen this from both sides, by the way -- I was in the Air Force when A.F. leadership went through a "TQM" craze. It didn't work worth a damn then, and "Sun Tzu's Guide To Crushing The Competition In The Global Marketplace" doesn't work now.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I have to admit that I haven't been following Linus's interviews too closely as of late, but I do remember reading in 1996 or 1997 (when I first tried to install Linux) about why he created it; he did it for himself.
He wanted UNIX for his PC because he thought DOS was crappy.
He had a lot of people appreciate his idea and even make him a Geek Icon. Hey that's pretty exciting stuff for a young geek to have lots of other geeks look at you in awe.
Eventually the reality of what you are doing sets in. It's not a hobby anymore and you are not doing it for yourself anymore. People depend on you to run their businesses, they want you to lead an OS holy war, so to speak.
Eventually you either let the crowd push you to insanity, or you have to decide not to care what everyone is screaming at you, and you have to remember why you started all of it in the first place.
Linus is right, though, he shouldn't really be caring much what everyone else is doing. Linux should be it's own product and not the "me too" product that it has become.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
So he annoys the faithful by proving himself a mortal?
I never had the misconception he was out to slay the evil Microsoft or other such competitors. He has always been "the author of Linux", nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
This interview simply confirms it, he really is just trying to make it better. He isn't at WAR with anyone, he isn't into that grandstanding.
Maybe a few people here could take a lesson from his interview. Then, maybe you might know what it is all about.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I worry about Linus and also Linux. I feel like Linus is trying to disassociate himself from Linux because he has two dynamics at work inside him.
1. Linus realizes that he really is the leader of a large and idealistic movement, and would like to see the Good Things(tm) keep rolling.
2. Linus either feels that he is not the man to lead, or he realizes that he cannot be the leader forever.
His reaction is unfortunate. If he really does want things to keep rolling, he needs to provide for a sustainable method of succession of power.
Linux is a religion these days. Really. It may not have gods, but it has a fiercly defended ideology that really does border on the metaphysical.
Human knowledge is libre is not so much a radical notion, but its particular application to technology is very radical--bordering on the spiritual.
Look at all the major world religions. They have all suffered at some point due to the schisms created by lack of smooth power succession. These problems are inherent to systems where there is one guru.
I hope I'm not decending into troll territory here, but the FreeBSD core team idea is a very good one. There are no succession problems, and the team seems to deal well with changes in staff despite the smaller numbers of people working on the project.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Plato: Linus, do you agree there is a human nature?
Torvalds: You know, I could care less. I don't think anything is going to really change if we discover there is indeed a human nature.
Hobbes: But surely you must account that people do what they do to serve their own ends?
Torvalds: Again, see my answer to human nature. It just doesn't matter to me.
[end philosopher round robin]
The thing is that there is an incredible difference between Torvalds and Stallman. Torvalds told us he isn't a big thinker. Stallman is. Insert Stallman in the above conversation he would definitely give the big thinkers something to argue about.
The reason there so much more contraversy over Stallman than Torvalds is because Stallman allows us to disagree with him. You can't disagree with Torvalds point of view because he doesn't have one. Stallman's view of human nature is directly involved in what we consider today free software. Just like the US Fathers of Constitution view of democracy is directly involved in what is today the United States.
I argue that those of you tuned to your computing terminals without thinking of the big picture--the so called pragmatists--that you have no way of arguing against those who do. And I plead you to not argue when you really don't know what you are talking about.
Softupdates? KSE? SMPng? KQueues? They're all worthy of discussion, and not only that but Linus has discusses kqueues on linux-kernel in the past, and while putting down the BSD interface as being over complex, he hasn't managed to get any similar into Linux last I checked. I'd really like to hear what Linus has to say about KSEs vs. clone() as well. And SMPng is doing some very interesting things with giving interrupts a context so that you can use adaptive mutex locks in them to increase scalability -- I'd appreciate hearing Linus' opinion on those as well.
I have a bad feeling, though, that Linus would take his usual tack of being casually dismissive of what other OSes do, while not really adding anything useful to the larger ongoing discusssion. And I'm sorry if people feel that statement is flamebait, but I've read linux-kernel and seen Linus behave this way. He needs to mature a bit and give credit to other people's work, even though he might disagree with it.
kernels are essentially a solved problem, and future interesting stuff will be going on above the kernel level, not in it.
That's incredibly naive. There's a lot of interesting stuff still to do in kernel development. If you think that kernels are "finished" maybe that is because you're spending your time in the Linux world too much?