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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."
His erect penis,
Plugged inside a man's anus.
He is a faggot.
I just turned 26, I wish I was as successful as Linux...
I want to see how he will undo the systemd shit.
Perhaps Linus is willing to be wrong, but he's unwilling to admit when he's wrong. He's incredibly arrogant and it sets a bad tone for the interactions between developers, and in how they deal with users. Making a quick (and possibly wrong) decision rather than being more careful also means that the Linux kernel is a mess. Sure, there are areas that use good coding practices, but mostly it's just a bunch of haphazard code that's been thrown together and barely compiles. That's certainly true with drivers and many of the new features. Compare the Linux kernel to BSD and you'll see a huge difference in coding practices. BSD is far more careful and it results in kernels that are far more stable and efficient. Perhaps Linus makes decisions quickly, but that's often not a good thing. Being thoughtful is usually a far better idea. As long as Linux decisions are made quickly rather than thoughtfully, Linux won't have a chance against Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows. Maybe stuff gets done quickly, but in the long term, it's really holding Linux back.
Personally I thought most involved in the open source software community had an understanding of this concept, am I wrong.?
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?
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.
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.
for all that he is famous for flaming people, he also allows others to be wrong
Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time. GNU was almost finished except for a kernel, and Linus wrote a kernel.
That's all folks.
Funny I was just reading "Main Linux Problems" you can find elsewhere and I don't think looking at that and OS usage statistics that Linux is a "success"
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I see what you did there, timothy. I bet you don't.
At the bottom of the
The secret to old age is whatever old people have been doing that isn't normal. ("What old people have been doing," because well, obviously. "That isn't normal," because other people do normal stuff, so that can't be it.) It's called survivorship bias. Successful people just don't want to admit how much of their success is owed to sheer luck, and neither do the people who look up to them. Kills the motivation.
Time will prove this out.
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.); contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing; etc. And dare I mention the nightmare of dealing with an initrd, which is more of a side-effect of some of the above?
Not that other systems have done perfectly well without going through all these continual changes and contortions.
"You cannot have improvement without change, but you sure as heck can have change without improvement!" https://slashdot.org/comments....
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Willing To Be Wrong
It goes without saying, but it's ok to be willing to be wrong provided you have some skills and a clue of the issues you need to deal with. Otherwise, you are just a morbidly fat walrus flapping on dry land.
What is this userland configuration tool of which you write? Everyone knows that you should put the network configuration information in 3 different include files, and recompile the kernel (from 5 1/4" floppy) when it changes.
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.
Considering he's never been wiling to admit when he's wrong.
The Victor Hugo quote about nothing being more powerful than an idea whose time has come is, to me, the story of Linux.
In the '90s we had the beginnings of the internet, so people could collaborate in ways they had never done before. We had commodity PC hardware that could do interesting OS things. More.
My first Linux system was a 486/66 with Slackware 96 back in 1997. It worked fine. I use Slackware to this day on my own computers. The standard at work is CentOS. So be it.
...laura
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] 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.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
The s/w licensing. We take that for granted nowadays, but 15yrs ago it was a make or break for a lot of high profile projects.
Linus brought the right license and "kept at it", aka adoption. those 2 things make up 75% of why Linux exists today.
Linux was successful initially because people were REALLY REALLY sick of all the Un*x wars going on at the time. Here was a way out of that shitstorm.
"I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
Torvalds for Senate!
Willing to be wrong, after yelling at, screaming at, swearing at opposition until all but the most thick-skinned and persistent get the message through.
Peoples views on systemd are totally orthogonal to recognising that exploiting children for sexual pleasure is utterly reprehensible. If feminists are against child rape then I'm a feminist.
Now fuck off, and when you get there you can fuck off some more.
You should read the book "Outliers" by Gladwell. In it he examines why Gates, Jobs, etc became so successful. Was it because they were smarter than the rest? No, it is all about timing. In a short window, the computer industry was shaping and if you had the right knowledge you could create a company that became a leader. He dissects several successful business men and shows that it is all about timing. The IT giants (Jobs, Gates, etc) all were born roughly in the same year. If you were born outside that window, chances are much much smaller that you succeed in creating a giant IT company. For instance, he talks about hockey players. All elite hockey players, are born in january, february or march. If you are born in january, instead of december, you had almost a year more of physical development. Which translates into you being drafted into hockey schools instead of the december boy. And your hockey teacher focuses more on january boy (because he is better) and gives him more training. So he is selected to play more matches, instead of sitting on the bench. Over the years, this accumulates and adds up. So after 10 years, he is maybe twice as good as the december boy. So ALL elite players are born in jan/feb/mar. If you are born in december, you are NEVER going to make it to the top as a hockey player. There is NO elite hockey player that are born in december. But he also talks about... basketball(?) players that gets drafted in june. And guess what, all the elite NHL players are born in... June, July or August. If you are born in May you are never going to make it to the top as a basket player. Just drop it and change career plans. The book is _extremely_ interesting and again and again he explains that timing is everything. There is a short window where you can succeed. If not, it will be much much more difficult. FreeBSD was sued in court so nobody would touch FreeBSD. So Linus T had a window of opportunity. If FreeBSD were not sued in court, it would surely has won because FreeBSD was technically superior than a Linux kernel made by a teenager who just learned to program. The code was _bad_. That is why Linus unwinds code in Linux, because he did not know the best way to do stuff. So he experimented and tried this and that. He had to learn the hard way what works or not. That is also why Linux has no stable kernel ABI, so it is a moving target which creates lot of threads on "I upgraded Linux and now my sound card / printer / etc does not work". All OSes except Linux, has stable kernel ABIs. If Linux device driver model was superior, all OSes would change their driver model.