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.
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
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...
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.
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
... 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
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?
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.
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