Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
I am not saying Torvalds is "most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years.", but I am struggling to think of one person who is *definitely* more influential.
Who's on your easy list of 20 people? I am very curious.
I can name 20 (or 50, or maybe 100) people with far more economic influence in the last 20 years than this douchebag.
Yet somehow you could not type one name here...
Huh? The GPL makes explicit use of both capitalism and copyright law.
You get to be a leader by getting people to follow you. Bluster and bullying works for some, others actually pull it off by being nice (not the same as trying to please everyone!). Others still lead quietly by example. And what works for some will put off others. Of course, it helps to be right often; if you are, you don't have to give people shit to make them follow, but they'll still follow if you do. That is what Jobs and Torvalds had/have going for them.
The one disadvantage about quiet leadership is that you will much less talked and written about. Or maybe that's an advantage...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Huh? The GPL makes explicit use of both capitalism and copyright law.
Stop with the actual facts, you are confusing people who have already made up their minds... It's perception that rules the day (and what gets politicians elected, but that's another thread. )
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Yes but only if they get rid of Poettering and his crew first.
“The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task,
the people say, “Amazing!
We did it, all by ourselves!”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
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
If you craft your definition of "most influential individual economic force" carefully, then yes, Linus can qualify.
But consider that without Richard Stallman and the GPL, linux wouldn't have been what it is now.
And to stay in the tech world, how about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
And political figures like Vladimir Putin.
Or maybe Osama bin Laden, just look at how much has changed since 9/11.
But even though it was in 1983 so that it doesn't qualify, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was perhaps the most influential man in the history of mankind. By correctly identifying a false alarm, he may very well have prevented an all out nuclear war.
Linus' attitude is not 'aggressive.' It's completely unprofessional and undignified. The community will be better off without him.
... 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?
> You don't get to be a leader, by being a nice guy in the commitee.
Sure you do. It's just *harder* to do it that way. That's why most leaders are pricks.
Because it's hard to be nice AND lead.
But it's easy to lead and be a prick.
Meetings
None of us are as dumb as all of us./a
Time to offend someone
Tim Cook.
Gabe Newell.
Larry Page.
Mark Zuckerberg.
Marc Andreesen.
Mark Benioff.
Jen-Husng Hwang.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I have never read anything where Linus is acting inappropriately. Sure he likes to rant, but when he is wrong, he will admit it.
He is even kind to clueless newbies who try to lecture him on the "evils" of goto on LKML.
His best rants are condemning breaking user space and hurting usability. But for every post that makes the news, there are at least 1000 that don't, because Linus isn't some rabid douche.
The kernel gets has so many contributors from around the world that he has to draw the line in a very explicit manner else people like Kay Sievers will keep submitting broken patches.
If anything he is usually pretty restrained, compared to project managers of big companies. The only difference is that development of the Linux kernel is in full public view.
You haven't answered his first question - is the article accurate or not?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yeah, my band director in high school was pretty much a dick sometimes and had a reputation for being difficult to deal with.
We also won all but one of the 10 or so contests that we entered in my first year in marching band, getting 2nd place in the one where we didn't get 1st place. That included winning the state championship in our class.
These two facts are not unrelated.
Part of the reason that Linux exists and is so successful is Linus' personality and work ethic. I don't think he's out to make new friends in the programming world, but he is very successful at what he's actually doing.
Do you have ESP?
Ridiculous.
Remove any of the people on your list (except maybe Elon Musk, and that remains to be seen), and things would've just been business as usual with a different person in the seat.
Linus has made an incalculable change to the landscape. We are in a different world because of him.
Disclaimer: I am not a Linux zealot. Windows at home, Mac at work, iPhone in my pocket. But credit where it's due, for fuck's sake.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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
We all know he will die one day. The question is whether he will die before or after the Linux kernel becomes self-aware and can maintain itself.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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
You really think that? Linux runs in practically all data-centers globally, saving trillions of dollars world-wide for business annually. It powers most devices, including a very popular type of mobile phone, used by billions, and you're comparing that to a president of the United States, or even worse, a governor of just one state? These are career politicians that have only a marginal influence on an economy that largely drives itself. Politicians are simply not that influential. Of your list, only Bill Gates qualifies as comparable, as he did something enormous as well: create a market for software alone (before MS, software was a means to sell hardware). The others are small fry: politicians and people that run a business worth a few hundred billion with simply operate in the economy. They didn't change it.
You're probably mislead by the fact that from the economic impact that Torvalds made, he didn't become exceedingly wealthy. But the impact is there, and it is enormous.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of us are exceptional, however. Your name is missing an 'r' and you left your end anchor just dangling out there, so...