Linus' Lessons On Software Dev Management

Esther Schindler writes "In this interview with Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Linus Torvalds shares hard-won wisdom about managing software development projects, including encouraging community involvement, the importance of programming tools, and ensuring the project stays on track. For instance, regarding getting people to contribute to your project, he says, 'If you start off with some "kumba-ya feeling" where you think people from all the world are going to come together to make a better world by working together on your project, you probably won't be going very far.'"

Comments

Re:Kumba ya?

[mugurel]

Torvalds was always more pragmatic than Stallman. And Stallman is getting more out of touch with reality, not having programmed the last 20 years.

If you're trying to say Stallman is a weirdo, I agree, but there's no need to insult the good man.

Besides that, you don't know what you're talking about. His last commit (at the time of writing) to the emacs source repository was less than a month ago:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?qt=committer&q=stallman

Re:Kumba ya?

[miffo.swe]

Stallman is more in touch with reality than most people. Imagine where BSD could have been now without the constant rape and pillaging of it? The reason it flunked is purely because of the license and that nobody ever gives anything back to the BSD community.

Had Linux been based on the BSD license it would never have taken off like it did.

Re:Fighting Evil

[H0p313ss]

I once told a microsoft tech rep that the purpose of Linux was to make Windows better.

Doing it yourself

[MonsterTrimble]

FTFA:

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That's not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you'll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they'll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you're going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

That is probably the most true statement I have ever read with regards to crowd-sourcing. You have to be willing to do it all yourself with input from others.

A stable device driver API would help the users

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking the user experience in order to ‘fix’ something is a totally broken concept; you cannot do it. If you break the user experience, you may feel that you have ‘fixed’ something in the code, but if you fixed it by breaking the user, you just violated that second point; you thought the code was more important than the user. Which is not true.”

Hmm. So this doesn't count everytime the Kernel APIs change and a bunch of device drivers get broken? IMHO it's the users that get hurt by the lack of stable kernel APIs since the original developers are the only people that have the skills, source and tools to make the fix - if they are still interested.

Re:Kumba ya?

[timeOday]

I think RMS is just expressing his priorities, not being out of touch with reality. Here are three groups to consider:

1) Money-oriented: Larry Ellison, Bill Gates
2) Technology-oriented: Linus Torvalds, James Gosling
3) Socially-oriented: Richard Stallman, and... not many others in this arena

If you judge people in one group by the values of the other, they seem deficient. Torvalds failed to capitalize on his success. Ellison is a bastard. Stallman's head is in the clouds. But they are at or near the top of their own games.