30 Years of Linux: An Interview with Linus Torvalds

https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and-git

by AdmiralAsshat • 5 years ago

155 75 5 years ago

This guy is Buterin 30 years from now.

Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term. There is an initial wave of enthusiasm which provides a time window to unload the bags though.

zabzonk3• 5 years ago

Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term

Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich".

And who the heck do you think is "blindly following him"?

blippage• 5 years ago

Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich".

My guess: VHNWI (very high net worth individual), defined by Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hnwi.asp as the range $5m to $30m. Maybe he's even in the ultra HNWI range.

He doesn't "look" rich, but then, what does rich look like anyway?

ObserverNeutral6• 5 years ago

Compare him against Bill Gates and Larry Page.

Also when I said blindly follow the Open Source project leader I was referring to Buterin and Nakamoto

Bancakes2• 5 years ago

Why do successful people always have to be rich? That's such a toxic silicon valley expectation.

ObserverNeutral6• 5 years ago

Because it's not like you write songs which make people dream and fill a stadium to come and hear you play them

Nor you are acting in movies which again make people dream and embrace you as part of their life.

You are writing freaking code, if you don't get the money, all you are left with is the tepid admiration of nerds around the world...can't imagine anybody desiring that.

If Linus were to create a startup tomorrow it's not like people would waive their salary for the opportunity to work for the great man.

To summarize if you don't get money you are left with absolutely nothing in hand.

TheAdamAndChe2• 5 years ago

In our economic system, those who produce the most value to other people are able to eek out profits while still helping the purchaser. That incentivizes people to produce value and focus on things that help people the most. Linus undoubtedly has produced incredible value and efficiency gains for the world, and those who want to see such efficiency gains continue want people like him to be rewarded for their behavior.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Nobody distributes free software to be rich. Not sure where you're grabbing all this from...

Koshkin5• 5 years ago

Not sure if this is true in general: many paid-for software products have free versions; free games might offer in-game purchases, etc.

cassepipe• 5 years ago

First off, I'm doing quite well. I'm not insanely rich, but I'm a well-paid software engineer, doing what I like to do, on my own schedule. I'm not hurting.

Exmoor• 5 years ago

Every once in a while I try to imagine a world where Linux never existed. Some software feels sort-of inevitable. For instance, even if Microsoft and Apple's desktop operating systems had failed, it seems almost certain that there would have been a dominant desktop graphical operating system (OS/2, etc.) so the landscape would have looked fairly similar to today.

Linux just feels different. There have been other open source operating systems, but to me it doesn't feel like they would have inherently taken over the same market that Linux has now if it had never existed. Like, do I really think my phone, my VM server, and my cloud computing infrastructure would be running FreeBSD in this parallel universe? Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems.

zabzonk3• 5 years ago

Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems.

Like, for example, one written by Apple?

rdsnsca• 5 years ago

or Microsoft.

mhh__• 5 years ago

They probably wouldn't be running the same OS if it was licenced under a BSD licence - the GPL encourages Linux-like projects to be both open and centralized which is why we have Linux today.

Koshkin5• 5 years ago

a world where Linux never existed

would be dominated by the BSDs!

nickt• 5 years ago

Not sure if you’re talking about Berkeley Software Distribution of Blue Screen of Death but I suppose either would be right!

Jiocus2• 5 years ago

Torvalds on his coding environment,

I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'.

Hell yes.

pestatije• 5 years ago

There you go! After 30 years the light turns on.

Koshkin5• 5 years ago

From what I see, nano has pretty much already replaced vi(m) as the standard command-line text editor in Linux (not sure about other UNIX-likes). I believe it is also available for Windows, which is nice...

mixmastamyk• 5 years ago

micro has recently stolen the easy to use, portable, terminal editor niche with its sane CUA keybindings.

guenthert2• 5 years ago

I think it's noteworthy, how little his choice of editor (or most other tools, including distribution) matters for the rest of us happily using Linux.

kingsuper203• 5 years ago

So when does the cruft and craziness build up to the point that you have to start all over again again?

reirob• 5 years ago

There is actually a similar question that is asked in the interview:

Is there anything in the kernel which is not optimal, but would require a complete rewrite to address properly? In other words, the kernel is 30 years old and knowledge, languages and hardware have changed a lot in these 30 years: if you rewrote it from scratch now, what would you change?

And Linus' answer was very interesting for me - and after reading it, I would answer your question (tongue in cheek): "Never, because it seems that Linux developers were quite successful in starting all over again for quite some parts of the Linux kernel."

I guess it's not really an answer to your question, but kind-of ;)

kingsuper203• 5 years ago

No doubt any replacement would have to be enough better that it's worth the cost (opportunity and otherwise) to both produce and switch to it. Perhaps security/privacy issues might drive a serious rehatching of commonly used software.

It occurred to me that there's enough inertia at this point that you'll likely only see ground-up architecture and/or implementation when some sort of hardware substrate is produced that requires it. Until then, we are on the karmic wheel of cpus that drive os/language design that drive cpu design.

Koshkin5• 5 years ago

Well, even now Linux is not the only choice (in theory, anyway). As far as desktop, Haiku does not look bad at all. On the server, a BSD is all you need.

kingsuper203• 5 years ago

As a member of the old Thinkpads/OpenBSD masterrace, I appreciate the concept. It sure can be a pain sometimes though, plus I'm lusting after one of those M1 Mac Minis.

3pt14159• 5 years ago

I love how Linus gave so much credit to Junio and downplayed his own personal role in the project.

Koshkin5• 5 years ago

He probably regrets not calling it JuniOS.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Wrong project.

jefurii• 5 years ago

I read an interview where he says that he names all of his projects after himself.

bombcar4• 5 years ago

[He] Started Linux 30 years ago, and git 15 years ago ... sounds like we're due another big project.

Someone change the license on something Torvalds uses and piss him off!

TacticalCoder• 5 years ago

Wow: that is very early adoption! I'd say Linux, with Slackware, around 1994 (?). Git took me a bit longer for as I was a happy Mercurial user but once I saw the momentum shifting heavily towards Git I switched.

qw3rty01• 5 years ago

30 and 15 years was when Linus started writing each

xiphias23• 5 years ago

If he allows another language in Linux, there is nothing that could piss him off anymore.

1_player• 5 years ago

I'd love a new C-inspired language (no, Rust is C++-inspired) made from a pragmatic developer like Torvalds. Zig comes very close IMO, but it's still too unstable to be under Linus' radar.

Gravityloss• 5 years ago

Ken Thompson and the estate of Dennis Ritchie's copyright claim for the C programming language syntax goes through. It is sold to a copyright troll company that starts demanding licenses from all users.

On a more serious note, a new programming language would really be the next step. If tradition holds, it might turn out to be really hard to use though.

MR4D• 5 years ago

My vote is video card drivers.

After all, we know there is no love lost between him and Nvidia....[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g

mpol• 5 years ago

I had to laugh about him using a micro-emacs that has been unmaintained for 25 years :) Apparently the other emacsen are not to his taste, so we can expect something soon :)

trenchgun• 5 years ago

I wonder what would a code editor made by Torvalds be like.

_nalply2• 5 years ago

I really was surprised that he used µemacs. More than twenty years ago it was my favorite editor, too, and when I read that he still uses it, for one second or so I considered returning to µemacs but snapped out of the reverie very soon after.

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's.

College can really lock you into one editor or another for a lifetime.

bombcar4• 5 years ago

There's something fundamental about your first "keystroke shortcut" learning - I believe Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts long after 1-2-3 ceased being a force in the market.

vhold• 5 years ago

First thing I searched for is GCC and I'm really glad he emphasizes how important it was to the origins of Linux. It's historically under appreciated how critical GCC was at that time, how it had far far reaching impacts that changed the path of computing globally.

GCC not only makes Linux possible, but it brought the other unixes closer together, which is instrumental to escaping the vendor lock of the various *nix vendors. That means by the time Linux is reliable enough for production, there is already a lot of cross-platform software to run on it.

bombcar4• 5 years ago

People make fun of the GNU Hurd project, but GNU really did work on the toolset in nearly the best order possible; a compiler is fundamental and without it you have nothing.

It took decades for LLVM to finally appear as a workable alternative; even the BSDs relied on GCC.

guenthert2• 5 years ago

I'm sure that topic had been discussed to death long time ago, but I enjoyed reading about the original reasoning for picking the GPL as license for Linux as stated here in this interview.

udev• 5 years ago

When/where can we read the second part of the interview?

crescit_eundo• 5 years ago

From the article: "Check back next week for the second part, where Linus explores the lessons and insights gained from three decades at the helm of the Linux kernel."

ilamont• 5 years ago

Impressed that he sees communication as one of his primary responsibilities. I don't think this gets enough recognition at distributed organizations, whose members often take communications for granted or fail to recognize how powerful it can be as a mechanism for more effective everything.

I was also struck by his comments about the preferred tool, email:

Email really ends up being a wonderful tool, and we didn't rely on face-to-face meetings.

30 Years of Linux: An Interview with Linus Torvalds

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