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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.
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.
Linux kernel development needs people who are capable, period.
And you seem to forget who Linus is married to.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
systemd is a distro decision, not a kernel decision.
I'll admit he is showing signs of developing alzheimer's, (No matter how much I explain, he still thinks "Foxfire" is his operating system) but windows update automatically downloading windows 10 in the background has been repeatedly posted on / and seems to be a pretty common issue:
http://www.cio.com/article/304...
http://winsupersite.com/window...
http://www.howtogeek.com/22855...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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...
In the late 1970ies and early 1980ies, especially the University of Berkeley in California (UCB) added a lot of valuable tools to UNIX, which on many commercial Unixes were installed in /usr/ucb. They even started to reimplement Unix from scratch and created their own distribution of a UNIX kernel and a userland, called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). AT&T, which acquired Bell Labs, the owner of the original UNIX source code at the time, tried to claim ownership on everything that was added to UNIX with the argument, that all the programs and extensions were derivative works of the UNIX source code.
To avoid a similar disaster, Richard M. Stallman tried to start from scratch, creating a complete UNIX environment which was not tainted by any proprietary code, and also invented a licence that guaranteed that it remained so for all eternity.
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.
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.
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."
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Each GNU knockoff of a UNIX tool had many more features.
Yeah, but they were missing features too, like for example that feature where sedcore dumps when you give it a "long line": GNU sed lacks that feature. Ans so on.
Facetiousness aside, the GNU tools didn't just have more and richer features, they were much, much better implemented and even the core feature set was more solid, more reliable and often substantially faster.
I remember in the 90s having to work on a mishmash of SunOS (was it SunOS or Solwaris then?), IRIX, HP-SUX, AIX, Digital UNIX and maybe one other that time has removed from my memory.
First order of the day was always to install the GNU tools because oh my god the system tools were bad on those platforms. Slow, features ossified from two decades before, arbitrary length limits, terrible error messages. Yuck!
Shit, many of the machines didn't even have a shell with tab-completion installed, and certainly not installed by default. The next thing was then to install a version of vi which didn't stink. Back then I used elvis.
Back then GCC was not a 100% clear winner. In terms of engineering it was a better compiler. Much less frequent coredumps, more solid and so on. Problem was it didn't have a great optimizer then and frequently the otherwise worse system compilers produced substantially faster code. GCC is now top notch.
One thing though, GCC has only just caught up to the late 90s ear HP-UX compiler in that the C++ compiler then would offer a list of "near matches" for when an identifier doesn't exist, something GCC only has in a pre-release version.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What's your alternative to NetworkManager? Manually configure every WiFi connection?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
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.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
You are quite wrong.
http://time.com/3856066/aol-ve...
2.1 million people in America using dialup as of last May.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
Systemd is a program. It's the first program the kernel calls after it's done it's work. There are several programs available that do the work of systemd. How could Linus (a single Sr developer on a world wide project) enforce anyone's choice of program through the kernel? Sheer will?
Virtually all distribution maintainers, from institutional to consumer grade, have moved their supported init system to systemd. There's nothing stopping you from using initd or upstart if that's your preference, but you'd better get used to writing startup scripts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Sure but I'm asking about GNU userland on commercial Unixes not Linux on your 386/486 at home :D.
I can answer that with one word: Consistency. The behavior and feature set of a given GNU binary on an AIX box was the same as behavior and feature set that it exhibited on a SunOS box, which in turn gave you the same behavior and feature set on HPUX, BDS, whatever...
You just didn't get that kind of comfy feeling when hopping between OS types and using each vendor's proprietary implementations of a given binary (by function).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
For simple wifi stuff, wicd is a nice lightweight solution.
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the problems described here as justification for systemd's awful interface naming are all things that should be taken care of by a higher level tool such as network-manager.
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. . . .