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Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Linux turns 25 this year(!!). To mark the event, IEEE Spectrum has a piece on the history of Linux and why it succeeded where others failed. In an accompanying question and answer with Linus Torvalds, Torvalds explains the combination of youthful chutzpah, openness to other's ideas, and a willingness to unwind technical decisions that he thinks were critical to the OS's development: "I credit the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. [...] The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. [...] I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
If you believe this to be the case, how do you account for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD?
Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Clear and through decisions my ass.
Or maybe he's not that brilliant, just a bloody good engineer, but he simply has no tonnes of useless management and marketeers with No Clue pulling him back and forcing him to implement great viral ideas like internet in things or database file system (yes, i am referencing windows future file system) ;)
It's so damned hard to tell these days--especially with Americans, who seem increasingly prone to take any criticism of their work as a personal attack.
(I'm originally from America, so yes, I'm allowed to say that.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Nothing is more despicable than people who attempt to shoehorn less qualified people in. If someone, let it be a minority or whatever, then let them succeed on merit alone, not this crap you're peddling about how STEM needs more women. It doesn't, by the way.
So please take your atrocious and neo-fascist bullshit back to whatever SJW pit it came from, where feelings are more important than anything else. And nothing is quite so insulting to women as your bullshit that the only way they're going to do well in STEM is if we give them golden tickets. They can do it on their own, through their own merit.
He's managed lead one of the most elaborate software development projects ever undertaken for fifteen years, taking it from a tinker-toy up to one of the most successful of all operating systems. That's pretty impressive. Managers may not produce anything directly of value themselves, but that doesn't mean they are not important for the success of a project.
I'm turning 46, and the "I've accomplished nothing" feeling can eventually go away. The sunrise doesn't care whether you've achieved anything.
I think Lennart P. would be utterly delighted with that and would get RedHat to put a fork of linux that he can claim as his own under his control. See PulseAudio and NetworkManager back when Lennart was running them before he started systemd for an example of how messed up that would be.
It was a success because people far more talented than he was were willing to support an idea
How he earned this support? By luck?
a fucking tool for acting like a CEO
What the... with this statement. This man may (of course) not invent everything, he is of course not the most talented, but he definitely know stuffs he put in the kernel, and know how to do this very good (many of Slashdot users seem to agree that such "ruthless" Linus to be, is the reason why Linux is successful). If he such a tool, unlike a company, some other "more talented" people just fork the kernel and many other talents will follow the new ones.
and attempting to take all the credit for the millions of man-hours of work donated by other people.
You could track who has contributed to Linux kernel. How Linus "attempts to take all credits".
Unlike CEOs, who "invented" X, "designed" Y, and no one knows who the fuck actually done for them.
Sure but I'm asking about GNU userland on commercial Unixes not Linux on your 386/486 at home :D.
Just out of curiosity what exactly made the GNU tools so liberating in comparison to the proprietary implementations ? I can't imagine the tools being as feature filled or stable as they are now, so was it price (compilers) ?
I can vouch about how usable my HP-UX, SunOS and AIX workstations became after I installed the GNOME desktop , bash and openssh and a bunch of GNU packages on those. This as 12 years ago. There were/are official vendor repositories for GNU software. So yes, I second the AC, GNU without Linux is still liberating.
So politics and Hollywood do not exist?
No, they're all SJWs, including Trump.
PS: SJW means "anyone I don't like and for the record, I'm also a fuckwit"
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I used GNU and other free software tools on SunOS several good years before Linux existed. The GNU tools were better in every way than the SunOS ones. Each GNU knockoff of a UNIX tool had many more features. The C compiler was better than the Sun one, and so was the debugger. There were many new applications that I used that didn't exist on SunOS. At some point I was running a system where SunOS was just a kernel, and everything else came from free software. Linux mostly replaced this SunOS kernel by a different kernel - nice, but not a mind-boggling innovation.
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/li...
"This is being written to try to explain why Linux does not have a binary
kernel interface, nor does it have a stable kernel interface."
Good God, that's tripe:
Executive Summary
-----------------
You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and
you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and
you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also
get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel
tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature
operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first
place.
How fucking arrogant does one have to be to tell me what I want?
What would be "liberating" is if the GNU userland was replaced with something that wasn't trying to emulate unix commands from 1960. Where apparently typing vowels in command names is taboo. Where -f means force, except when it's -F, except when -f is default implied and you need to use -q to not force -f. Or the fact that there are what at least a half-dozen different commands that have their own way to collate a list of files. Or maybe a way to use the shell reliably without having to escape the escaped escapes in case there are escapes.
>NetworkMangler is his too?
No it isn't and never was. Yeah, just keep on believing every lie ever told about systemd and Lennart Poettering. The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users. They are not afraid of spreading misinformation since they know how gullible people are and that people never check "facts". A simple google search would have showed you that the OP lied. Please don't ponder whether you bought into other lies and misinformation about systemd and other GPL Linux projects under attack. You might hurt your brain.
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
I'm not sure decision-making is really his big thing. The first reason Linux was successful is that he's a doer, there's plenty of flag-wavers that want to lead other people but who couldn't get a kernel project off the ground if their life depended on it. Linus is more like the first soldier charging, everyone else coming up from behind. Git is another fine example of this, if you know exactly what you want then just do it yourself. You don't wait around for someone else to write it for you. Obviously this is also a bit of luck with timing, but it's still not a common quality.
The second reason is that he managed to let go, so many people when they create something it's their baby and they want to control everything about it. I'm sure he was as opinionated as ever, but he wanted patches and mailing list discussions. That's why he got talked into using the GPL, it would have been easier to just sit in a corner and say I'm working on it, leave me be. And it never would have become more than a little hobby project by a CS student that'd die when he got a job or girlfriend and couldn't commit the time.
The third reason and maybe biggest is that he never started getting into business or politics, I remember him saying something like that he's building the best kernel he can make and if that'd dethrone Windows it'd be a wholly unintentional side effect. Which means that he's not taking guidance from marketing and sales on making an ABI so you can have proprietary blobs so you can increase revenue or go off evangelizing like RMS, to him the kernel is the ends not simply a means to an end.
Also I'm sure he could have become a CxO somewhere if that's what he'd wanted, but he never wanted the suit. Now many engineers don't want that, but a lot of us would do it anyway if it came with a fat paycheck. As far as I know he's not anyone's boss, the only authority he's got is final say on what goes into the Linux kernel tree. And he's always focused on having a vendor-neutral position, you don't get to hire him and tell him what to do next.
The fourth reason is that he managed to delegate, I've seen people stretch themselves thinner and thinner as the project grew and just burned themselves out. It might come naturally to a manager whose main job is delegating anyway, but it's always hard for a person who likes to know the details to accept that you can't be everywhere in every discussion reviewing every line of code. I think trust comes hard to Linus, he's erred on the side of caution and found conservative maintainers that are in it for the long run though he might have lost some good but impatient talent along the way.
He's always come across to me as a very pragmatic kind of smart, I think "street smart" would be undervaluing it but not the kind of academic 150+ IQ kind of smart. Just a fairly straight forward engineer who will dead-end discussions he won't have or arguments he won't accept in a blunt and occassionally rude way. I'm not sure his decisions are the best, but he's pretty good at cutting through the fluff and getting to the core of the issue. I wish I could do that in my job, no one hour meetings to "discuss" things. Give me the 30 second elevator pitch and I'll tell you if it's worth bothering with. Sigh, a man can dream...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What's your alternative to NetworkManager? Manually configure every WiFi connection?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
How many men could have been at the same place and time, and simply fail the job? (True for Linus Torvalds, also Bill Gates, etc...)
This.
I used to think the "right place at the right time" argument had some merit. It's probably still true a little bit, but only as an opportunity for Linus. It was when I saw how rapidly git was developed and became reliable and usable that I realized it was no fluke. Either Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time *twice*, or the "luck" argument is nonsense.
The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users.
That's patently false.
I have been using Linux since the earliest versions, and have only ever casually installed *BSD just to see what was there, and I absolutely loathe systemd. All of the distros and distro-forks that have appeared at without-systemd are maintained and used by ... wait for it ... Linux developers and Linux users. Not a single one is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Trying to turn this into a BSD vs Linux thing is just pathetic.
This was the money quote:
All of the great leaders I have worked with have had this capability. Most of the great developers I have worked with have been like me - always wanting one more fact, one more bit of information. I'll mull over a difficult decision for a long time trying desperately to make the perfect decision.
I worked with a CEO who could make a multi-million dollar decision in seconds with limited and imperfect information - and then never look back. It was this ability that drove the company to become a billion dollar enterprise. We had other executives who were too careful, but he kept driving us forward. He was every bit as bright as the smartest guys in the company (many of whom worked for me in IT), but he was able to live the old adage: “Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Combining the ability to be decisive in imperfect situations with the ability to reverse course when events demand it is what allows an enterprise to take advantage of opportunities and grow rapidly.
Well... it's many factors. What is more rare? Talent or opportunity? What is more applicable at the time? And is that level of talent impossible to find in another human?
My guess is opportunity is by far, the more rare commodity. Linus was no slouch, but I doubt that he is the Einstein of programming. What he had was the necessary talent at the right time and the willingness to use it.
Make no mistake, the opportunity required someone like Linus, I certainly couldn't have done it, but I think that there are more people like him out there than there are opportunities for someone like him to make a difference.
Of course, this is not "luck". Linus had to have built up skills and the right attitude to take advantage of this opportunity. There is no way this could have descended upon him like a lottery win from a single lucky ticket.
However, if he'd been hit by a bus, there would probably still be something like Linux out there eventually. I mean, it was a logical next step when you had everything for GNU but a kernel, right?
I'm turning 46, and the "I've accomplished nothing" feeling can eventually go away. The sunrise doesn't care whether you've achieved anything.
I'm 52. I was in a great relationship with a wonderful woman for 20.5 years. We hugged, kissed and said "I Love You" every day, went almost everywhere together and held hands where ever we went. She died in January 2006 of a brain tumor, just seven weeks after diagnosis. I was strong for her. I was holding her when she died. I heard her last breath, felt her last heartbeat. She was never alone or in any pain. I kept all my promises to her.
I've accomplished everything that really matters. The feeling I have now, when I'm alone at every sunrise, is something else entirely and I'm not sure it will ever go away... Just thought I'd throw that out there for some perspective.
Remember Sue...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Damn man, sorry for the loss. May peace and happiness find its way to you.