Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk)

Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.

Comments

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone honest.

Re:Finally

[DickBreath]

That instantly disqualifies him for management or political office.

Re:Finally

[Dutch Gun]

The internet is not to blame for humanity's failings. Neither can we realistically expect it to solve them. I'll still take, on balance, the world's information at our fingertips and global communication and commerce over whatever alternative you think would be better.

the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people

Only by incredibly naive, overly-optimistic pundits. For those of us living in reality, it turned out pretty much as expected.

Re:Finally

[WheezyJoe]

Linus' point is there's too much attention spent on hype (the "innovation"), and too little spent on actually getting something built. Having built something himself, and maintained it longer than the lifespans of countless tech companies, he's in an excellent position to say what he's saying. The weak link in the chain is where you start raising money with your idea and your salesmanship, and it becomes time to start hiring engineers, leasing office and factory space, and building prototypes that have a shot at becoming real products. All that costs money, a lot of it, and some "entrepreneurs" and their benefactors simply can't handle seeing all that money they raised just slip away. Easier to keep it, brag about how much you've raised, keep shaking hands with billionaires, and keep on partying on the fund-raising circuit, kicking the whole build-it thing down the road for as long as you can (it's better than bankruptcy in the event your product fails). Human-nature can creep in and fuck-up any good idea with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door. Wasn't it Jobs who said "Real artists ship"? That's what Linus was talking about.

which is why everyone can't be a programmer

[OffTheLip]

No matter what the talking heads say about STEM and giving equal opportunity to all. It take real skill, dedication and talent to be a real innovator. Luck comes later.

Innovation is sooo last year....

[TexasTroy]

Get with the times - you have to be disruptive now.

Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble

[Austerity Empowers]

And we cant just say "fuck it and fuck your bullshit, I'm heads down working"

Actually, you can. In some places just like that. In others possibly "I'm busy, when do you need this by". If you are in a place where you are working hard, and which values your contribution, the message survives the diction. In other places, which talk a lot about technology but really just need glorified MBAs who know how computers work, you probably can't get away with this. Quit.

I think his message is exactly right, and so many companies get lost in the bullshit they are unable to get the job done. Often of course because they have moved into the Wall St. phase of "let the losers of the pyramid game get their money back, if possible".

Any asshole can have an idea, most of technology (or most anything else for that matter) is the hard work. This is also what makes us so hostile towards patents that don't have products behind them.

Re:Perspiration

[Danathar]

Yea, but who likes Thomsas Edison? He was a jerk and an ass.

Re:Innovation

[orasio]

Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.

I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Yet he proved that great execution of an existing idea is much more valuable and has a much greater impact (worldwide, long lasting impact) than a beautiful, innovative design.

The work is more important than the idea

[sjbe]

To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.

Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.

And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.

It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.

Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.

Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger

[DickBreath]

I watched the development of micro computers in the 1970's. Try re-reading BYTE (and other) magazines of the era. The technology was shockingly primitive. No standardization. The first standardization was around hardware, the 8080 and the S-100 bus. Still no significant software standardization because every system had some cobbled together custom keyboard / display or printer setup. Find a used keyboard from a liquidator, figure out it's circuit board layout, write your own custom interface software, etc. It wasn't until 1977 that the holy trinity arrived (TRS-80, Apple II and Commodore Pet). The first standard off-the-shelf computers. This was where you started to see some commercial software take hold. Just watch the ads in the magazines.

Now to the point.

I am ignoring Unix until a time when it was practical for most people to actually run it. The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC. By the mid to late 90's some people were noticing that you could run Linux on a souped up PC for ten grand and replace a thirty grand Unix box.

If Linux hadn't come along, Unix would be something in obscurity.

Here we are today where you can get Linux on a Raspberry Pi for $35 with 1 GB of ram, gigabytes of SD card storage, 4 core processor, etc. And proprietary unix is relatively obscure.

That makes Linux sure seem innovative to me. It obviously did something VERY right. So much that now Microsoft can no longer ignore it.