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Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the early-Happy-Birthday dept.

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."

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    I want to see how he will undo the systemd shit.

  2. Linus's real talent: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Driving away important contributions from women to the kernel at a time when STEM needs more women and minorities than ever.

    Why would anyone support this misogynistic asshole?

  3. His real secret for success by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Linux wasn't a success because of him. It was a success because people far more talented than he was were willing to support an idea. Linus is a fucking tool for acting like a CEO and attempting to take all the credit for the millions of man-hours of work donated by other people.

  4. Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... by fnj · · Score: -1, Troll

    If the licence had been BSD then much of that code might never have seen the light of day

    Did you go to special school in order to say things that stupid? BSD is much more free than GPL, but both of them flat out guarantee that code released under them stays free forever.