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The Scalability of Linus
Hugh Pickens writes "Katherine Noyes writes at LinuxInsider that it may be time for Linus Torvalds to share more of the responsibility for Linux that he's been shouldering. 'If Linux wants to keep up with the competition there is much work to do, more than even a man of Linus's skill [can] accomplish,' argues one user. The 'scalability of Linus' is the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet wondering if there might there be a Linus scalability crunch point coming. 'The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the "official" repository,' Corbet writes. A problem with that scenario is the potential for repeats of what Corbet calls 'the famous "Linus burnout" episode of 1998' when everything stopped for a while until Linus rested a bit, came back, and started merging patches again. 'If Linus is to retain his central position in Linux kernel development, the community as a whole needs to ensure that the process scales and does not overwhelm him,' Corbet adds. But many don't agree. 'Don't be fooled that Linus has to scale — he has to work hard, but he is the team captain and doorman. He has thousands doing most of the work for him. He just has to open the door at the appropriate moment,' writes Robert Pogson, adding that Linus 'has had lots of practice and still has fire in his belly.'"
Arrogant people who achieve power never give it up voluntarily. They hold onto every little bit of it for dear life. Torvalds would no more voluntarily give up his ultimate authority than he would jump off a cliff. You can make all the reasonable arguments in the world, it's not going to change who he is. Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.
What is needed is a good new fork with strong support. Unfortunately, for all the bitching and moaning about Torvalds, that has never really come together. He is a driving force and developers have accepted his Linux kernel as the standard for a long time. There are a lot of branches out there, granted, but at the end of the day they all ultimately go back to the same tree. Getting developers to accept a new mainline kernel as the standard (and to give up the "Linux" name), and getting some superior distros out there (you would need an equivalent of Ubuntu) would require a lot of work, organization, and some charismatic leadership. The OSS community could handle the work part okay, but the organization and charismatic leaders parts--not so much.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus?" - An Empirical Study
by Leonard Richardson
Published on segfault.org 02/23/2000
http://www.crummy.com/writing/segfault.org/Bus.html
It even coined the "Bus factor" phrase:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Linux is Linus's creation, he should have ultimate commit decision power
...and still has fire in his belly
Perhaps he should eat less Mexican food.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The Linux kernel is not a company. Free software projects are a new kind of entity.
The debate is still open about whether it is correct to level "They should..." instructions at this kind of entity.
Possibly "I should..." statements are more appropriate.
-paul
It's called Andrew Morton
how long until
That will solve this problem once and for all.
No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.
Already, most distros maintain slightly forked versions of the kernel, to suit their needs(ie. enterprise-ish ones like RedHat might do more driver backports, MontaVista introduces BSPs for a variety of oddball boards, etc.) Because novelty costs money, people don't generally go further from mainline than they have a good justification for; but there are already dozens of quiet, not-very-adversarial, slight forks floating around, mostly in the hands of the various distros, and some of the embedded engineering houses.
PREPARE THE ELECTRODES!
We've been on 2.6.X since 2003. Somebody needs to pull the cork out ...
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Isn't that what blogging is for?
You mean all this time while on the island Benjamin Linus was able to do more things than he led on? Who knew. ;)
"No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing."
Linus Torvalds don't see that problem. Kernel is not moving from GPLv2 just because he doesn't want to. The day Linus wants to move to GPLv3 (if) he will just do so together with a public anouncement of the change. Whoever finds entitled ownership to a piece of code will be free to ask his commits out of the tree if he feel not wanting the change and that's all.
The things about whining bloggers is there's a lot of them, and eventually one of them raises an important point. So if Linus dies tomorrow, just what will happen? Will the official kernel be run by committee? Will it be managed by the alpha dick from the ensuing ego battle for the top job? Will the community be fundamentally fractured losing the official repository?
Linus 'has had lots of practice and still has fire in his belly.
He should really lay off the vindaloos
Here I was thinking that this was some article about whether or not Linus Torvalds should or could have children.
Anything from Linuxinsider I would take with a healty dose of skepticism - it's better known for their anti linux shills.
The failure in the argument is to assume that Linus' kernel is in any way "official". Distribution maintainers don't think that way at all.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Linus is monolithic.
Do you even know who Jonathan Corbet is? Among other things, he created LWN.net, has been a Linux kernel contributor for longer than that, and has written books on Linux kernel development (for example, the O'Reilly "Linux Device Drivers" book).
He's been on the inside for a long time. This is an opinion you should at least respect, even if in the end you disagree.
Who cares? If Linus stops updating his repository tomorrow, we'll all just switch to whatever repository meets our needs.
It's only consensus that says that Linus' repository is the "official" one.
There are already plenty of people who track Andrew Morton's repository instead of Linus', so if Linus went away, it's not like we don't already have a tested mechanism to allow us to track "unofficial" repositories.
*sigh* back to work...
Could be that he doesn't want that access but wants to know who his new boss will be when the old boss is no longer viable.
Having that kind of core stability is one of the aspects that has allowed linux to bloom in recent years.
It seems to me we're seeing a large amount of progress because of a stable base surrounded by competitive user space projects.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Another year of Linus on the Desktop.
I wonder how feasible it would be to ask people to voluntarily reassign their copyrights to some entity, so that the kernel (or their parts?) could be updated to GPL3. Can parts of the work even be licensed in separate ways like that?
Anybody would be perfectly free to chase down a contributor and ask them to offer their contribution under different terms(or buy it from them and offer it themselves). The issue is just that there are a lot of contributors, including some who may be virtually impossible to get ahold of(releases under GPL2, dies, copyright is still owned by estate, who could sue your ass; but estate doesn't even know that the copyright exists, until mony-grubbing grandson graduates from law school and goes hunting, or any number of other horror stories, in addition to the entities that are perfectly easy to find; but just don't want to.)
For maximum practicality, you'd probably want to go after contributors(in order of importance) and ask for a change from "GPL2" to "GPL2 or later"(so that you don't break compatibility with "GPL2" components; but could, in the future, build a GPL3+ one). My understanding is that you would almost certainly encounter people very much not interested in doing that, so it would mean a lot of legwork, possibly a bit of cash, and some re-writing of obstinate portions; but there is no binding constraint.
It would be merely unfeasibly annoying, not impossible.
Heh. I kind of like the completely random asides you get on Slashdot. It's like the Simpsons, start on one plot for a couple of minutes and then swing on a wild tangent. At least that's what I remember it always doing.
which is totally what she said
I'm afraid that is not how copyright law works.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
It's also possible to found your own nation every time you disagree with a new US law. But it's certainly not realistic or practical to do so.
Comment of the year
Open source?
Linus is at the top now because he does a very good job and people trust him. The actual development is done by thousands of developers (around 3000 contributors / release currently), number increasing. It sales just fine.
The way he is accomplishing this, is by using a network of trust (he talk about it in his talk about git).
This is very scalable, as he is not actually checking out every peace of code, he just merges them.
What would happen if he would suddenly go crazy or hit by a bus? The answer is simple: one of the core maintainers, like for instance Andrew Morton would take over the position. General development would continue as it is now, as Linus talked often about how and why he runs things the way he does, and many people agree with him there.
It is a really bad for any development that it is just one person that controls all the patches and the framework of the linux kernel. The main risk being that it might all come to a halt one day because of a accident or sickness of Linus.
It is also clear that one-person aspect also slows down the development, and allows for less creativity solutions to problems and results in regards to development of Linux.
There are many good reasons to have more people accept patches into the linux tree. One person is just problem waiting to happen (and it already has according to the news in question).
These random asides on Slashdot sometimes remind me of reading a Wikipedia article, and then getting distracted by one of the links, and then that link spawns another ten more links, and so on.
Not that I'm complaining, :-)
Best "String" Ever!
And where would I found it? AFAIK all known land is already owned by some existing nation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! This is what we open sourcers have been saying for *years*. To those who kneejerkily say "I don't have the time" or "I don't have the skills", well, sorry. You can pay someone else (ala Microsoft or Apple), or pay a consultant to mod Linux and other open source software to your needs. Either way, you're paying your time or your money; TANSTAAFL.
Nathan's blog
dies of a Mono infection.
Following Wikipedia article links reminds me of TV Tropes. (URL omitted to protect the still sane.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Not feasible in the Linux kernel case because some people who have contributed a lot of the work have died so their code would have to be replaced before any GPL3 relicensing.
Just including a link to Robert Pogson's blog since none was provided in the article: http://pogson.6k.ca/
Exactly. And what they have in linux.org is a way to keep the entire thing from exploding on every new bleeding edge thing people want to add. Like what Google is trying to do with the Android pieces. Hack the kernel so it works in a phone setting, that's a fork. Want to commit it back? It should be something valid for all linux uses. So they used wait locks instead of writing a hook or something, because it was easier. Linux.org says "no, do the work so it actually contributes something to the rest of the project and we'll commit your changes."
Google has a big collective ego though, so if there was a major fork that became adversarial, it would probably come from them. I'm sure they have their own kernels for their various node types anyway, I mean, why wouldn't you. Who needs SCSI and audio drivers for a bigtable node? And they have the ability to publish or sell a kernel to a wide audience, argueably bigger than RedHat can.. But it would be a shame, because Linus is really the reason linux is stable, compatible, and the whole ecosystem works. You get a few layers below the kernel and it gets to be a chaotic mess. If there wasn't SOMEONE without a major commercial interest, without an agenda--other than adhering to the original spirit of the project--the kernel would fragment, compatibility would suffer, and everyone would have to make custom kernels for specific applications. That would be bad. In the words of Dr. Dre, "Slow is better. Trust me."
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The problem with this is that there are a lot of people in a structured hierarchy around Linus. He maintains the very top of the hierarchy as "Supreme Dictator" and (i) uses his tools (e.g. git) and (ii) the hierarchy underneath him to manage it all.
After that 1998 experience, he learned the lesson and setup the hierarchy. After nearly having a similar experience during the 2.4/2.5 series development he wised up some more and expanded the hierarchy even further.
Linus might be the only one that can commit to his official branch of the tree, but it is one of many - all of which he draws from as the patches make their way up the hierarchy. Want to change a device? Submit the patch to the appropriate sub-tree, and wait for it to filter up to Linus. Any outside party cannot submit directly to Linus any more - it must go through his Lieutenants first, and their Lieutenants before them. All of this keeps the level of work that any one person does to a rather reasonable level so no one necessarily gets burned out - other than for politics.
Sure, Linus may go away some day; but there are probably enough people that have administrative permissions to his tree to be able to hand it off to someone else as well if he wasn't able to before he left (e.g. Bus Factor). Even then, there are several parallel trees (e.g. -mm) that are of equal quality run by one of the Lieutenants.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Geez, Linux is not some revolutionary, unique software. It copies from other systems and OSes. As long as we know what and where, we can figure out why and how.
As for Linus: not scalable. He needs a break. and do you all really know he's the only one that commits? Really? It's just a git account, i.e. Linus could still be committing in 2310, if he gave someone his password of course... Conspiracies, conspiracies....
Come on, Darl, let it go. It's time to move on.
It is touched at above and you touch the issue: As long as you move faster than the others, people follow. When you slow down, people find others to follow. This is also true in commercial business - when companies start using lawers instead of developers they have lost.
As long as Linus seems to keep up the steam, the rest follows, when he slows down, people will follow others. The bus-factor? There are clever people around who will be followed. Some will fight to take over Linus' position. If they get close to it, the development is already somewhere else.
...And why should I care?
Get the latest sources and start maintaining your own tree if you think you can do better job at it.
This piece of random speculation is useless and irritating.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Eh? What competition? There's much competition OS kernel market?
Ah yes, HURD is a almost nibbling at Linux' ankles! Hurry Linus! Merge faster or Stallman will take your place!
Look, Jonathan -- Genius' do what they do and don't give a shit about anyones opinions. Just shut the hell up and get off the inttarwebs, you are embarrassing yourself.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Don't forget that various of the developers are deliberately licensing their new code as GPL2 only because they dislike the GPL 3 so much. All it would take to make the problem more manageable is Linus refusing to accept new code that's GPL 2 only unless there's a good reason for it, but he won't because he likes the status quo.
Screeched the pygmies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"I'm afraid that is not how copyright law works."
Maybe you are right but:
a) There are judges if the case arises
b) That already happened and that was the way Linus Torvalds dealt with it (when he moved the kernel to the GPL license).