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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."
I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
Let's talk about kernels.
The number of Linux kernel currently running on mobile dwarfs XNU. Windows 7 dominates Desktop. Apple does better on Desktop than Linux, but this is becoming less relevant.
Linux also dominates the cloud.
Well, he could accept the patch that one of the kernel developers posted after getting sufficiently p*ssed about the systemd developers, that would simply panic the system if pid 1 is systemd.
I don't have to believe anyone, because I was there. I remember running GNU software on AIX and SunOS before Linux existed. I remember exactly how liberating it was, 25 years ago, finally to have a GPL licensed kernel on which the GNU tools were the native userland instead of third party software, and a commercial kernel was no longer needed. What is ancient history to you is vivid memory to me.
Were you even alive in 1991?
It was the freedom. You could be root on your own PC.
You have to remember, virtual private servers didn't exist back then. You could rent time on someone's server but you didn't get root.
With Linux, you didn't need expensive hardware or a Unix license, and you didn't need to share. You could have a whole multiuser Unix-like OS all to yourself. For free.
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...)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
NetworkMangler is his too? That completely changes my opinion of him. I used to think he was a hack-and-hope chancer who chucks things over the wall when they're barely half finished.
Now I know it for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Capable != willing to put up with bad attitudes and being shouted at.
Indeed. This is why Sarah Sharp and Matthew Garrett left: unwillingness to put up with bullshit. Both contributed a whole bunch of really good stuff to the kernel and are thankfully still gainfully employed in the greater Linux community, just not with the kernel itself.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You're correct, Linus does not maintain packages outside the kernel. That being said, he wields incredible influence, more than any one person, over the rest of the Linux community (GNU/Linux or whatever you want to refer to the whole community at large) and if he determines that something must be eliminated for the good of Linux in general, he would use that influence to see that the software would be a pariah and eventual bit death. The thing is that he must see something as a great threat to stick his neck out for it and last I saw him comment on systemd (several months ago), he saw it as flawed but, worthwhile if improved. So, like most things, he left it to the community at large to decide its fate and they have overwhelmingly decided to adopt it, flawed or not. Except for a handful of foaming at the mouth system admins, the vast majority of the community have replied with a resounding "meh." With the majority of the community ambivalent, the majority of package maintainers have chosen to adopt it, for better or worse. Either get over it and learn to use it, develop and better alternative or move to a distro that doesn't use it. Either way, quit trolling boards about systemd. You lost, move on.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Licencing.
I agree that Linux' success is mostly about licensing, and I think the GPL did play a positive role, but I don't think it's as big as you say. At the time when Linux emerged and started building up steam, BSD existed but wasn't a viable alternative because it wasn't clear who owned it or how it could be legally used. Linux had an overwhelming advantage because its licensing situation was clear.
BSD was eventually freed by the courts in 1994, but by then Linux had already grown an ecosystem of distributions, with lots of great new ideas about how to package, deliver and support software. Some of those ideas were a direct outgrowth of the GPL philosophy, and the GPL on the kernel and the GNU tools helped to set the expectation that virtually everything should be open, so I don't want to understate the GPL's contribution, but I think that BSD could have been in roughly the place that Linux is, if it had actually been available for use and distribution three years earlier. I think we're better off with Linux and the GPL than we would have been with BSD and its license, but BSD could have worked almost as well.
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.
Heh. OTOH, my father in law used a Debian box for years (I set it up for him, after maintaining Windows for him proved to be a Sisyphean task), and I had a similar nightmare trying to keep it updated. I wrote a script that dialed in every night at 1 AM and downloaded for six hours, then disconnected. That clearly didn't work because every now and then a package update came down that was bigger than what could be downloaded in six hours, and completely choked the process. So then I set up a complicated system that got a list of packages needed from the box at his house, sent it to a server I had, which downloaded the packages there, then his box rsynced them. That worked better because if a download didn't complete one night, rsync would resume it the next. That system worked for a while, though the box might go for a few weeks downloading before it had a complete set of updates and could apply them. But eventually the volume of updates grew to the point that it basically never caught up. So, every now and then I downloaded the outstanding packages to a USB stick and took them up to his house.
When I got tired of that, I convinced my wife and her siblings that we should all go in together and buy him a year of broadband (a 5mbit WiMax service). Predictably, when the pre-paid year was up he happily took over paying for the broadband service himself. It cost 3X as much as his dialup had, but was dramatically more useful.
There's a fundamental problem here, and it's not the decision by Windows 10 to download updates automatically. The problem is that modern systems are too big to keep patched over dialup, and, frankly, the Internet is no longer very useful over dialup. Now, I'd hope that Windows 10 offers you an alternative way to deliver updates to it, but the real solution is to get something better than dialup. To be clear, not updating is *not* a viable alternative.