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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."
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."
But Steve Jobs is dead, so why are we worried about his personality?
if he were to die
I pretty much thought that death was the only thing guaranteed in life. Except for taxes, obviously.
Summation 2
Why does Slashdot seem to refer to Bloomberg articles so often? They are controlled media. Evil.
Couldn't Torvald's opinion be discussed without referring (and linking!) to "Gloom-Bird"?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Page filler and click bait talking about lines of code and the fact that Linus tells people to fuck off.
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.
It doesn't matter how well you speak or how reasoned your words. You are called a smelly hippy who's done nothing but infect all software with communism and he eats dead skin, eeewwww.
Because RMS doesn't let capitalism and copyright settle themselves as a priory eternal truths.
Man, oh, man, what a man this man must be.
"may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years."
Lesson: Being a jerk is good.
I can name 20 (or 50, or maybe 100) people with far more economic influence in the last 20 years than this douchebag.
It would be healthy for a lot of these guys to move on. Hoards of these kernel poobahs are aging in place, providing little room for new blood and ideas. The BSD's development is somewhat less personalized and more surgical.
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
You mean the butthurt from the poetterix crew for getting flak for their own poor attitude, crap code, and generally poor disposition?
I think we need Linus a bit more to keep a lid on these... less than stellarly performing artifacts sticking in the community's craw.
Linus may be blunt, but at least he is a friggen good engineer. Greg? Well, uhmm, not even close, by 1000 miles.
We should move Linux to D.
We've had this conversation before, and it's a moot point.
It doesn't really matter if Linux can go on without Linus, it'll go on if he's there or not.
Slashdot sure is getting desperate for 'news that matters'
And everyone except apparently Linus knew that 10 years ago.
Whaddya mean, "if" he was to die?
Is there a chance that Linus is immortal?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Honestly being blunt and aggressive is how you don't end up with a steaming pile of crap.
Being all wishy washy and nice is not how you get things done, you crush egos mercilessly when you have facts in hand.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When Linus has been piped into the great dev-null in the sky, I for one will welcome Lennart Poettering as the new Emperor of Linux. We'll call it Lenux!
What, too early to start a flame war?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude.
Who?
Honest to god, I'm asking: Which people?
Are these 'people' software engineers contributing to the kernel? Are these 'people' being directly addressed and directly insulted by Linus? Are these 'people' attempting to submit subpar code to the kernel?
Or are these who are more interested in 'safe spaces' in open source communities? Are these 'people' acting outraged because of their perception of what other people think about Linus says?
I am disturbed by this brewing character assassination campaign targeted at Linus because he says things that might possibly hurt a person's feelings. Shame on the submitter (pacopico) for throwing around an accusation as if it's fact.
We've been down this road for, what, 20 years? We know by now that if Linus says something mean, it's because a person has done or said something incompetent. The 'fix' is not for Linus to change his tone; the fix is for the recipient of the insult to not be incompetent.
Some people, particularly on Slashdot, are changing the definition of what it means to be blunt in order to whitewash public perception of Mr. Torvald's conduct. Being blunt is direct and to the point without consideration for the feelings of others. Telling a person you hope someone disconnects the brakes on their car so they get into a car accident isn't being blunt. It's being a sociopathic asshole and often that's what Linus is. It's downright shameful that "nerds", people who've likely faced physical or verbal abuse at least once their life, make excuses for such inexcusable behavior.
Yes but only if they get rid of Poettering and his crew first.
It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P
I've seen pictures of Linus, and I've seen HBO ... Not sure I'd enjoy the intersection of Linus Torvalds and Gratuitous Boobs.
"I make Linux and focus on the Linux and that is how I work."
Linus' attitude is not 'aggressive.' It's completely unprofessional and undignified. The community will be better off without him.
progrees. In 1992, Posts. Therefore
... For all he is... including his bluntness which bruises the precious egos of the special snowflakes. Sometimes you need to be able to call someone a moron. There are too many of them to waste any more time on them than that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I wonder: would the same people that advocated the "calling females 'bossy' = sexist" view use consistent logic and assert that calling males "aggressive" is code for "I'm basically unable to defend my own position, am losing the argument, and therefore must apply guile and ad hominem attacks to stand my ground?" Be honest, now.
Is how someone interprets your criticism of their work defined by how much face they stand to lose if they're wrong, regardless of whether the criticism is grounded in facts and experience?
Linux can move on without a belligerent prick constantly berating everyone in his path?
You don't say.
Given how many submitters will submit an article with a comment of "He said X! He said X! Definitely gonna be nothing but X!" and the article actually says "Not X at all! Definitely not X! Anything but X! Never gonna be X!", I'm impressed that nobody submitted the article and said one of the following:
1) Linus Torvald's death is imminent.
2) Linus says he's going to kill himself.
3) Linux says Linux is doomed once he dies.
"He's 5-feet, ho-hum tall with a paunch, John Lennon-style round glasses, and gleaming, square-shaped teeth. It's cheap and easy but true to say his body type and gait resemble that of Tux, the penguin mascot of Linux."
Really, Ashlee Vance? Is it necessary to put a physical description of Linus in this article? If male writer included a physical description of a woman programmer for an article, there'd be deluge of complaints about sexism, as if a programmer's appearance has anything to do with his/her accomplishments. What an idiot Vance is.
He might enjoy that intersection though. I know I would.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.
Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.
Maybe there's a succession plan in place already but this strikes me as a major question that needs to be addressed.
I stole this Sig
He's always been aggressive and blunt. He's "irking more and more people" because those people want to take away what Linus has and he's not about to let them.
I suspect Osama bin Laden who was well known for his quiet, respectful and thoughtful conversation style (I'm not kidding, his policies and his personality don't match) might beg to differ with that. Much as I like Jobs and Torvalds I suspect 200 years from now they may be mostly forgotten while bin Laden is still remembered for mainstreaming Qutbism. Heck our likely next president, Mrs. Clinton, is rather introverted and tends to quietly guide the people close to her.
It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P
I've seen pictures of Linus, and I've seen HBO ... Not sure I'd enjoy the intersection of Linus Torvalds and Gratuitous Boobs.
It wouldn't be Linus - it would be someone like Brad Pitt or Mark Wahlberg. Of course, the actor would wear glasses to take on a "nerd" persona.
Do you have ESP?
Partly it's just Linus (and he's not covering his ignorance with bluster; he's not often wrong, but he sometimes is and will admit it to someone who argues right back), but his famous rants have the benefit that people other than the direct addressee hear them. Which has two benefits:
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.
You always know what he thinks.
Put the cards on the table, figure out which ones are good. Lather, rinse, repeat.
A smart man wants to know when he is wrong.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
'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
The opensource/OS wars are no different than any other religion. Those with a god-head thrive and press forward fastest up until mortality gets in the way. Overwhelmingly, religions that favor single supreme leader (usually based on bloodline) end up withering and eventually perishing through fragmentation and indecision, while those that adopt a kind of voting democracy for leadership, thrive and grow sustainably. Perhaps when Linus is no longer in the driver's seat, Linux will fragment, being pulled apart by commercial interest. Meanwhile, FreeBSD, having never had a benevolent dictator, will continue with its elected core team, nominated committers, and filtered contributors just like it has for the past 20+ years. If we are still using OS's built upon "C", my money bet is on FreeBSD.
Nothing evolves faster than the word of god in the minds of men who think themselves divinely inspired.
systemd.
an ill wind that blows no good
One thing that he was absolutely wrong about: his insistence that commit messages be wrapped to 72 characters. The summary is that he railed against the idea that display tools (like HTML) should automatically wrap text because humans know better how to wrap text.
Why the 72 character limit? So it appropriately works on 1960's display technology.
Oh, and the hilarious thing about this is that he word wrapped his own HTML text in the very Gtihub post, making it display wrong in the web browser, while everyone else's text looks correct at the right width as prescribed by the page's CSS rules.
https://github.com/torvalds/li...
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ermm, he's been wrong about pretty much everything except one or two small things.
The biggest and stupidest thing he did was to argue with the master of OS design (Andrew Tanenbaum, of course).
Linus is a retard, and gave the world sick puke like Linux and Git!
Linus Torvalds has given the world sick puke like Linux and Git !
And "timothy" is a retard.
Some of the most influential economic power houses: -
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Warren Buffett
Larry Ellison
Michael Dell
etc.
Linus is nothing in comparison.
All the linux crap can be replaced and the world will do even better with either BSD, Windows, or even QNX.
Linus will ultimately be legend.
I'm tired of these bowing-down, obsequious posts from Slashdotters about a guy who is neither a genius nor a hero, nor a great inventor, he just did a very good job over a long period of time in a difficult role as technical leader.
Do you need a hero to worship? Maybe look in the mirror and see if there's someone there who could be a hero, with a little bit of effort.
In terms of technical originality, I wouldn't put Torvalds in the same category as Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, or Bill Joy. But in terms of being on top of a lot of arcane but relevant technical subjects, yes, he's obviously world class. That's part of the price he has to pay to be the leader of such an important project.
As far as his interviews are concerned, they're usually funny and interesting, but every so often he acts like a total d**k. Such as when he emphasized that he didn't care about anyone in the Open Source community, apart from those he dealt with personally on a regular basis. That kind of remark could get someone fired from a tech company.
This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude.
The author seems to imply that Linus wasn't irking many people with aggressive attitude before. Um, really?
One thing that he was absolutely wrong about: his insistence that commit messages be wrapped to 72 characters.
Clearly you don't get email. Or plain text. I'd be surprised if you understood why top-posting is wrong.
That's why Linux leads and the kernel project is successful - he understands. You don't. No doubt you have trouble appreciating the Mona Lisa too ("it's just a painting of a woman, nothing special, I could do that with my camera/Photoshop"). Project management isn't Monday morning fantasy football and it involves real teams. But don't let that stop your delusion solipsisms.
Do you seriously think that hadn't been done several times before Bill Gates wrote his first line of code? A very good example is CP/M - the thing that MSDOS was a cut down clone of when Bill Gates bought it from Tim Paterson.
The tollboth guy? He STILL has his job? Now that's a broken system.
Who? Does he really think he's as important to the economy as the CEO of Halliburton or a pile of other companies with headquarters in his state?
Ever considered that my just mean you are blurring the difference between where religion stops and other things start?
eg. What would Jesus do? Starbucks didn't exist back in those times, so no, that question makes zero sense when ordering a coffee at Starbucks.
hahahahhahahhaa
*orders new floor*
"...about a guy who is neither a genius nor a hero, nor a great inventor, he just did a very good job over a long period of time in a difficult role as technical leader..."
Lets talk about this for a sec.
Does he have to be a genius? Can he really not be a hero to those of us that admire strong leadership and a huge "get it done" mentality in a world where everyone is too busy navel gazing to solve problems? And what is really meant by "invention"?
Lastly, why is someone who does a very good job in a difficult role as a technical leader, qualified by "just"?
" Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, or Bill Joy"
Did I shit talk these badasses?
Let me break it down:
Linus just started doing. He got shit from all directions, and kept doing. "Experts" came and told him why he would fail, making predictions that all were wrong, and he kept doing. He's still doing, *right this second*. He didn't sit around making excuses about how he's not Dennis Ritchie- he did. And he did well.
The best things are when he walks into a thread and tells everyone that they are wrong, and then just keeps going. Sometimes he doesn't care- he didn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He could code faster than people could bitch, he could integrate faster than people could debate, and that made a working product.
Maybe there's no genius in that. But there is immense effort, and a willingness to be stubborn even when it cost him.
" but every so often he acts like a total d**k"
Ya, I file those under "the good parts".
"That kind of remark could get someone fired from a tech company."
The fact that most companies couldn't deal with someone like Linus is a huge weakness of most companies. It's their loss. In the interest of removing conflict, they expunge productivity and creativity. What do you think Linus would say upon thinking about the fact that his amazing rants would get him fired? Think he cries about it?
I mean, I don't think so.
*this*
Hmm, i don't know how, such a guru like Linus, can manage to work on just seemingly 24" monitor.
I'm not effective without 2 x 24" running Fedora.
Linus was 100% wrong on that one and everyone he slagged off for being a negative nellie were 100% right.
How? Because Linus and Larry were BFF. What Tridge did to Windows SMB was fine, but when he did it to the BK network protocol, that was HERETICAL and was THE CAUSE of the "FULLY JUSTIFIED" RAGE of Larry and his throwing away of the toys in his pram.
Then after it was completely fucked up, Linus and others made Git which is working better than BK did.
Linus, despite being shown wrong (more likely because of it) and despite the warning voices being right (more likely because of it), continued to whine and whinge about how this extra work was delaying the kernel work and demonstrates how nasty and wrong everyone else was. It totally wasn't Larry's decision to do it and entirely his fault, no, definitely not, because Larry's a pal, a mate, a mucker. And Tridge UPSET him!!!!!
So, no, your canonification of His Holy Linus is rather missing one point of how he got things utterly wrong.
Which wouldn't have been bad: the decision of using BK made sense to Linus, because the restrictions didn't affect him in the least.But when he refused to accept that it was an error in any shape, sense or form, and moreover hypocritically blamed others for the actions of his BFF he went from being merely wrong to being intellectually wrong.
You might not be aware that HTML will strip the original line breaks and re-wrap the text, so wrapping at 72 chars works perfectly for BOTH new and old.
im no celebrity (in most circles) but ive absolutely said stupid stuff on internet record since 95 or so. ive changed a lot of opinions since then since i have aquired more facts. one should not judge a person too harshly on stuff that was said while drunk and high on IRC in 98 or something. seriosly.
It has nothing to do with the Linux kernel. If you read the post in context, he was mad that GitHub didn't enforce 72 character limits with all projects.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
He was mad that GitHub wasn't enforcing this policy with all projects, even though it's absofuckinglutely unnecessary. And if you look at the page, he was writing a post with manual 72-ish line breaks inside an HTML context (GitHub comments), making it look stupid.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Well no body lives forever, I think the Linux movement and community will go on long after Linus, me and anyone else who's in the open source movement passes on. Linux, is far larger than this question can encompass, Linux may splinter after Linus, but it will go on.
In this situation that just means the capacitor is in backwards and not a new pope of a cult that doesn't exist.