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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."
Im sure Linus enjoys the title of benevolent leader, but at some point packing it up is best for ones own sanity. Ive been in systems administration so long its easy to lose patience at the slightest question perceived to be too mundane or pedestrian. Developers seem way more apt to fly off the file handle after being chained to a project for a decade.
Cultivate a hobby. For me i moved into management as one is apt to do, and learned how to make soap.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Who is irked? People trying to dump tons of garbage into the mailing lists?
The goal of linus should be to encourage coders to contribute to Linux. Could he do better? I'm sure. But he has done amazingly well so far (service / cloud side / aws / even android had a basis in linux) - linux is huge.
The one BIG missed opportunity in Linux though I think was around wakelocks. That would have really helped connect the google kernel team into development. That's led to a real fork with android and in the long run I think will be missed opportunity. The folks arguing against wakelocks didn't really have code that replaced them effectively and was sad to see code talks and talk walks get bypassed there. I found the anti-wakelock camp depressing.
And Steve's personality was also NOT easy to deal with.
or describe in polite terms.
You don't get to be a leader, by being a nice guy in the commitee.
You have to have a vision to blaze a path to it, and be flexible enough to adapt with the detours.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
You don't get to be a leader, by being a nice guy in the commitee
I'm convinced that committees are the death of real leadership. A real leader takes advice and makes decisions decisively. Best leaders always have detractors, usually weak people who want a committee to decide things, after all who wants to follow a dictator? It is much easier to put the blame on a good leader than it is to blame a committee.
And Committees tend to make "safe" decisions, but are just as wrong (if not more so) than a strong leader. A real leader can see when things aren't going well, and make adjustments, where a committee only takes up time while everyone is discussing what the best move is.
I have a great disdain for committees, mainly because they are formed to avoid leadership responsibility.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There are six basic styles of leadership. As you point out, coerciveness can be effective, for some people. Personally - I'd rather lose my job than to work for a coercive person. A Steve Jobs could offer me more money in a year than I've made in my entire life, and I'd turn his ass down because I can't work like that.
Torvalds doesn't strike me as a coercive leader. He seems more like an authoritarian. His authoritarianism is mixed in with a little pacesetting, but he's basically authoritarian.
People commonly dislike both authoritarians and coercive leaders, so they confuse the two. After a course in leadership, you understand that the two types of assholes are very distinct from each other.
And, yeah, I'm an asshole too. I'm an authoritarian, tempered with a coaching approach.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
i no longer trust greg k-h: at the last (last but one?) merge window he was aggressively pushing for kdbus inclusion. as far as i'm concerned he nothing but kay's shill now. what trust he built up over many years by maintaining 2.4 branch, usb core etc... he has completely blown by aggressively pushing for kdbus inclusion i cannot believe no-one has called him out in public for this behaviour. if you are reading this greg: sorry, but your name is dirt now, and you shoudl just hang up your keyboard and call it a day: no-one should trust you now.
of course it's an over simplification.
But, with my non-humorous hat on, I would say MICROSOFT is the biggest problem on the internet.
They have made the most insecure operating system and become the most popular by being the cheapest.
Then they set most of the default options to the least secure choice.
That coupled with the relative ignorance of the general population (including too much of IT management) leads to the false image of Microsoft being a good software choice.
I like unix in all it's flavors. Modular and upgradeable, without tossing out all your software.
I like Apple after OS X ( I liked my Apple 2+ also)
I like Forth, C, Lisp, Modula-2(etc)
I like GNU, Hurd, Linux, Plan 9, Lilith, Rust, & Go.
Software the people can see under the hood ( and fix it if they are good enough) is GREAT !
I have run too much software that is buggy, spyware and exploits in it.
After 30 years of IT experience (VAX,Unix,SAN,admin, architect,development,teaching,B.S.in C.S.), that is my opinion.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
'I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways'. Linus Torvalds July 2013
There is more to it than being technically capable. If you want to submit a change and aren't able to confidently able to articulate the how and why of it you are going to waste a lot of peoples time, even if the change is technically correct.
I've mentioned this on here before but: When 2.11 kernel came out, somebody put in a sleep with a spinlock in an obscure part of the USB HID driver. I submitted a patch, which was just to revert that one section back to how it was in the previous kernel (which was just without the sleep) and it was rejected multiple times. It was obviously incorrect, but it was not until the 2.17 kernel that one of the mainstream developers submitted the exact same diff that it got fixed. I've never tried to make a contribution to the kernel since. Even when you're reverting a change that is obviously wrong, they won't accept your diff.