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.

Comments

Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[Skyshadow]

Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?

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.

Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[fReNeTiK]

Linus is the king, and he's surrounded by a small contingency of advisors who filter what gets through to him.

Yes, but you may want to ask yourself how these people got there... It's because of the quality of their code and commitment to maintaining their stuff. So it's rather a meritocracy than a monarchy and that is perfectly fine with me.

Damn, just look at that guy Marcelo. He's only 18 and he's maintaining the stable Linux kernel tree... I'm in awe.

Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[Skyshadow]

Hmm... has to be somewhat ironic that the backlash to the apex of capitalism (MS) has created a socialist system (the open source and free software movements) that is being guided by a monarchy, as you've put it.

Hm, I'm not sure it's fair to present open source (or, more accurately, RMS's free software movement) as being a reaction to MS's complete success in the capitalist system. 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.

And Linux isn't the only OSS system, just the most successful. But yeah, it is a benevolent dictatorship, and yeah, that is somewhat ironic, but maybe that's the way it ultimately needs to be...

Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[ukryule]

Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?

More a meritocracy than monarchy (i.e. if you prove you're good enough you get the power) - in this case Marcello proved that he was technically competent and so was given the responsibility of maintaining the kernel.

Of course the difficulty with any meritocracy is who decides your "merit". Unsurprisingly in this case (as in most cases) it's the ones in power (i.e. Linus & Alan). Thus whether it is a true meritocracy or not depends on the abilities of those leaders to pick out the best contributors ...

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

Surely you're arguing for external competition? In which case, that nice Mr. Gates seems to putting up a decent fight. And internally there are several branches of the kernel floating around, and the major Linux companies often seem to bundle their own version of the kernel.

However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question ...

Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[Carnage4Life]

Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?

Actually the truth of the matter is that most successful projects are run by a small group of people (e.g. one to four) with absolute say and complete CVS access with a smattering of others who submit patches on and on and a number of others who submit bug reports. I've actively monitored Open Source projects of various sizes including Scoop, JDEE, Mono and Xindice where the general case seems to be that core development was done by one to four members of the team who controlled most or all of the project with token contributions coming in from a few more.

In fact the recent Slashdot article on KOffice did nothing but reinforce the notion that I've long since suspected that most Free Software/Open Source projects are primarily the work of a small, autocratic team regardless of the size or scope of the project.

Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)

[nickco3]

However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question ...

That's easy. The new Kernel King will be Alan Cox, or possibly one of the other members of ZZ-Top.
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates, und I say WEENdoze".

Competition in the Kernel.

[metacell]

I think there isn't any competition between different Linux kernels, simply because it's not needed. The current team is doing such a good job, and it's easier and better to make an addition to the kernel than to split the source tree.

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". ;-)

Re:Marcelo

[DA-MAN]

Oh come on, give him a break. So far the only mistake was the 2.4.17rc3/2.4.18 error. He's a human, we all make mistakes. He's doing a good job and things are stabilizing at a good rate. If you don't like it, submit a patch. Make a difference, don't talk shit. Or if you're not technically capable of that, how about writing up a Linux Kernel HOW-TO. Come up with a process, if it's good it may end up actually being used. He seems to be a guy pretty open to anything.

Good job?

[NWT]

dW: How will you tell whether or not you're doing a good job?
Tosatti: When I stop receiving bug reports.

Score +4, Funny

Who is Marcelo Tosatti?

[rtos]

Who is Marcelo Tosatti? Well, I'm glad you asked.

• Marcelo Tosatti's homepage is here.
• There is also the Marcelo The Wonder Penguin site that has some info about him, but is currently down (Google cache).
• Advogato personal info
• Slashdot interview from December.
• Freshmeat has his comments on the kernel (scroll down a bit).

Hopefully you find some of that to be interesting.