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Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him
pacopico writes: In a typically blunt interview, Linus Torvalds has said for the first time that if he were to die, Linux could safely continue on its own. Bloomberg has the report, which includes a video with Torvalds at his home office. Torvalds insists that people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have taken over huge parts of the day-to-day work maintaining Linux and that they've built up enough trust to be respected. This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude. The line between "blunt" and "aggressive" is one that you probably get to skirt a lot, when you (in the words of the Bloomberg reporter) "may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years."
if he were to die
I pretty much thought that death was the only thing guaranteed in life. Except for taxes, obviously.
Summation 2
Linus has stuff online from the early nineties forward, and, to be perfectly honest, any opinion piece of his is 1000% amazing. I've never tried to search it all out and read it over coffee or anything, but slashdotters linking to anything he's ever said is one of my absolute favorite things about this place.
The BEST ones are where he's polite to someone who claims to know The True Path. The other amazing ones include the people who jump around screaming how Intel is about to die off and RISC will demolish CISC and all these other See The Future Guys. Basically, the standard crew of Tech Pope and his friend, the Tech Oracle... but we can view their ludicrous claims in the light of history. So you get to see Linus talk, and be nice, and they ramp up their crap to browbeat him, and eventually he just fucking OWNS them, drops the mic... and a 1-2 decades later we can be like "oh, looks like Linus was right to be polite at first, right to stick to his guns, right to switch gears from politeness, and right about all of that".
Linus will ultimately be legend.
It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P
It seems strange to me that with all the decentralization in software (ex. git) that Linus remains the sole gatekeeper for what goes or doesn't go in the kernel. Splitting up the responsibility seems like it would be infinitely more logical.
It is already largely decentralized. There is a relatively fixed set of subsystem maintainers, which collect patches and merge from contributors. Then there are top figures like Greg and Linus, and the individual Linux distributions which maintain their own kernels by merging across. All Linus really does (well, he probably does more) is take and drop patches and every other week declare a certain merge set a version. Anyone can do that for their own kernel, but the central naming makes it "Linux" and focussed (e.g. for bug reporting).
That's at least my understanding.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Software engineers like me who won't touch the kernel with a 10' poll because I don't need the aggravation of dealing with him.
That's a pile of character assassination dogsiht.
1. I wrote a few patches to Linux kernel and submitted one. The submission ended up fixing a problem. But the final patch was modified by one of the maintainers using API I as not familiar with. His patch was much better.
2. NO ONE called me a "noob" or was agressive in any way shape or form. But the problem area that existed for years, was fixed in a matter of few days. And then later it was improved overall.
3. I submitted my patch to both networking and main kernel lists, as per documentation. But all the discussion was on network list. After a few days, someone asked politely if anyone was looking at my patch on the main list.
So I'm sorry, but your character assassination attempt is nothing but hogwash.
Finally, don't worry, you would not be dealing with Linus anyway. You don't submit patches to Linus. You should know how Linux development works before running your mouth.