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More Marcelo Tosatti
Frank writes: "There's an interview over at developerWorks Linux Zone with Linus's latest lieutenant Marcelo Tosatti. He talks about what it takes to be the maintainer of the Linux kernel, what his plans are for 2.4 and his favorite hack." If you missed it, you may also want to visit the answers Marcelo gave to Slashdot readers.
Comment on them.
Honey, I'm tied in a basement with a dog collar.
My dick is long enough but it's attached too low.
Everyone's moved on to bigger and better things (2.5), he's the guy left holding the bag.
Why do you post such interesting stories in the middle of the night? It's not like anyone will read them... Just giving up a bit for the insomniacs?
--spiralx, posting anon. because I forgot my password.
Another lame interview with a Linux fag. How exciting.
I'm just glad that Alan Cox doesn't have to look after it anymore. Now he can spend his time writing drivers and hacking away at the kernel source. As well as helping Redhat. He did good work maintaining 2.4.x but his talents could have been better spent elsewhere. Let's wish Marcello the best of luck.
Seriously: Linus is the king, and he's surrounded by a small contingency of advisors who filter what gets through to him. I'm not suggesting that these people aren't all very deserving, but it seems odd that nobody else is cranking out any sort of alternative. MS or Sun can't be considered serious competitors (not on the same page), and all the BSD's seem to have been pushed to the fringe. This leaves other Linux kernels, and there are none.
I suspect this is because you just can't compete with Linus -- after all, he is the man. Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME have benefitted from having each other to race against. The kernel, on the other hand, exists mainly on the preferences of a small number of people.
Of course, Linus historically has shown great insticts; he's only been really wrong once that I can remember. This might sound like a call for fragmentation, but I still can't help but think that being open is good, but being open and competing against someone else is even better.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
When are people going to stop idolizing this kid. For christs sakes - Look at the piss poor management of 2.4 since he took over! How can Linux even gain any corporate respectability when a boy with hardly any "real world" experience is put in charge of what we all want to be a competitor in the server OS market?
The world will soon find out.
I am a sentient ATM.
Right, it's not driven by market forces but decisions are made by the kernel maintainers, but still... I'd say a lot of people use patches (especially driver stuff) before they make it into the kernel tree, so there's a certain amount of democratic feedback going on abour what patch might be the best for a task or a problem.
Seriously, though.... The poor kid. I shudder to think of the sick, fucked up things he has had to do to get where he is in the gay, pedophile, linux community. Chances are he'll be dead by his own hand before he's twenty-one. Even a member of the notoriously twisted Brazilian breed can only take so much.
Or are we talking about the user's need to choose between different kernels?
Well, you can run roughly the same software on the FreeBSD kernel as you can on Linux. Gnome, Konqueror, Ghostscript... it's all there.
There aren't many commercial vendors selling BSD versions, but that doesn't matter so much when you can just get BSD and install the software you need yourself.
But if there was a significant need for alternative Linux kernels, I'm sure the competition would crop up faster than you can say "ego-boosting Linux fanatic". ;-)
This interview is as terse as the last one.
Good that he is the maintainer, he would not add
anything that is not required.
If you look back, I think you'll see that RMS concieved the copyleft because a number of projects he was working on suddenly went commercial, leaving his out of the loop and separated from the hard work he'd been putting in.
Interesting, I've never heard this version of events before.
I thought RMS started Free Software after the issue with the printer driver.
<irony> A MSFT employee correcting someone with a 3-digit slashdot UID on the origin of copyleft </irony>
n/t
Dammit, it's not "Linux fag", it's "GNU/Linux fag".
Get it right next time.
"You're just scared like a little white pussy. I'll fuck you till you love me, you faggot!"
Marcelo Tosati is Italian and he wants his mother to read the story when it's still on the top of the page as she doesn't know how to scroll down using links/lynx and any other OSS browser that her son forces her to use.
Smile, don't click...
dW: How will you tell whether or not you're doing a good job?
Tosatti: When I stop receiving bug reports.
Score +4, Funny
Life sucks.
Ailing UK music group EMI has said it plans to axe 1,800 jobs in an attempt to cut costs.
The job cuts form part of a wider restructuring exercise aimed at restoring the heavily-indebted company's battered finances.
EMI said on Wednesday the revamp will cost a total of £110m ($154m) to push through, but should generate annual cost savings of £98.5m.
The overhaul includes new financing arrangements which will boost EMI's total debt capital to £1.65bn over the next three years.
Investor payout halved
"We are firmly on target to improve EMI's performance, and we are optimistic about our ability to attack the broader challenges," said Alain Levy, Chairman of EMI Recorded Music.
Most of the job losses will take effect by the end of the month, the company said.
It added that it plans to write down a further £92m this year to take account of loss making investments.
The new write-down comes on top of the £38m that the company spent extricating itself from its contract with fading pop star Mariah Carey late last year.
The singer had signed with EMI in March 2001 in what was rumoured to be one of the most expensive recording deals ever.
Investors in London reacted cautiously, sending EMI's shares 1p lower to 345p in early trade on Wednesday.
The dip in the company's stock price came as EMI said it plans to cut its dividend - an annual payment to shareholders - by half, to just 8p per share.
Music woes
EMI, hit by a decline in music sales during the global economic slowdown last year, made a £2m loss for the March to September period last year, down from a £59m profit twelve months earlier.
The sales downturn came amid mounting investor concern over the company's ability to service its debts.
There has been speculation that EMI, the world's third biggest music group, might be forced to sell off assets including its stake in the HMV record shop chain and its legendary Abbey Road recording studios.
Last year, EMI tried to merge first with Warner Music and then with German media giant Bertelsmann, but both proposed tie-ups fell through.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
I am from FRANCE, and I proudly declare that the US is the greatest empire in the history of world.
Death to the Arabs!
Marcelo's attitude is exactly the right one for this job. I wouldn't hire someone who think, that this is funny.
from http://kerneltrap.com/node.php?id=5
--
Q: How usable is the Hurd in its current version?
Neal Walfield: There has not been an official release of the Hurd since 1997. Most of the developers are concentrating on finishing the current feature set and working out important bugs.
With respect to usability, the Hurd works quite well as a desktop system, however, I would not yet recommend it to anyone as a server.
Q: How big is the team of people currently working on the Hurd?
Neal Walfield: There are currently about five people who work actively on the Hurd proper. As far as porting is concerned, there are about fifteen developers who participate regularly.
--
on the other hand, they integrated quite a lot of rather mature work from what has clearly been linux orientated development efforts, like filesystems, drivers and such - I wonder if RMS will call the final product GNU/Linux/HURD... :-)
dW: ...I read that you had been working at Conectiva for four years, and that you're only 18 now. How old were you when you started there?
Tosatti: I was 14.
Oh, that Slashdot interview! I didn't like it. I was doing a hundred interviews a day, so I was like, "Aagh, no more interviews!" and I answered their questions very fast, and people got angry because of that.
I guess the developerworks guys were smart enough to have the interview done at this time. Just imagine those "I'll work hard to maintain the kernel" answers they'll get if they didn't wait for a few months before they did the interview.
Don't quote me on this.
in event of rounding errors, the answer might be 13 or 15 ;-)
Don't quote me on this.
If you send in a Perl bug report and used the perlbug utility, nobody has to ask you configuration questions because they have the answer. If you didn't use it, then they just say to send 'perl -V'.
With OpenBSD they use dmesg in the same way as 'perl -V'.
Why with Linux would they have to go back and ask questions? Isn't configuration information (detected hardware etc) available somewhere? Why not just have a utility that sends it in attached to your bug report?
Disside from France before it's too late, you jospinist pig ! :-)
huh wait... this *is* too late
Smile, don't click...
It seems to me there's plenty of kernel competition... If you read lkml you'll notice many kernel trees other than Linus's - Alan Cox's, Marcello's, Dave Jones's, AA's, etc... and the differences from the mainstream kernel can at times be as great as you could imagine while remaining compatible - different VM (AA/RVR), different scheduling (O(1), preempt), low latency, etc... or how about competition in journaling filesystems: reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs, etc.
A bit more outside of the mainstream you have things like the RT-Linux kernel or the L4 etc microkernel based Linux implementations, or for that matter even HURD as a Linux kernel alternative.
Finally, how many people even use Linus's kernel trees other than unstable version developers? The stable kernel trees leave Linus's hands before they ever become stable and actually usable, and the distributors like RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE never use his trees anyway.
You'll see people on the Linux Kernel List fighting for ego reasons, you know, "I'm better than you." I just don't do that.
Here's your ego: _|_
yeah, but I bet its still a pain in the ass to install
-- null
1. kernel varsion (DO NOT FORGET ANY PATCHES and binary only drivers)
2. dmesg output
3 $LINUXDIR/.config
4 error message.
The insight here is just amazing. First question:
IBM - "What is 18 - 4?"
Tosatti - "14"
"Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm);"
If you are trying to say that the current system
makes it unlikely that Linus can or will be displaced, yeah you are right.
However, I wouldn't go as far to say that Linus
doesn't have to deal with competition.
Maybe not to his position but certainly to his
decisions.
Read the kernel lists.
People challenge Linus all the time, and every
submitted patch or post is something that Linus
has to explain.
In short, he is constantly being challenged.
And sometimes in a wider venue than the mailing
list as the recent Bitkeeper brouha illustrates.
So, yes Linus's position is pretty secure but
he is in the thick of a Gladiator's arena of competition of ideas all the time.
Experience alone is not enough. Brains are not enough. An agreeable personality is not enough. A truly good QA man must have a love of QA which borders on the religious. That is the whole nature of QA. No detail is too small. It is right or it isn't. Marcelo exposed his lack of the QA right stuff when he poo-pooed his gross error, saying in effect that it didn't hurt the x86 release too much, only those other oddball architectures. Well excuse me, buster! It's time to clean out your desk; I'll have security show you to the door.
Sorry Marcelo, but you don't have the right stuff for QA release engineering. Not everone can play the NBA, and not everyone can be a QA engineer. You have to be born with the talent.
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