Linus on Subversion, GPL3, Microsoft and More

victor77 writes "Linus has repeatedly slammed Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Subversion community has responded...how valid is Linus's statement?" This and many other subjects are covered in this interview with Linus.

Can't RTFA...

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 128) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

Indeed :|

Linus has repeatedly slammed Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture.

Did he slam it, or did he say that it's fine, just not appropriate for a project as distributed as the kernel?

PARADIGM SHIFT!

Damnit, it's a paradigm shift that Linus is talking about. True distributed source code management brings an entirely new way of working. It enables very fast merging at a very fine granularity, which lets you use casually use this information (about what changed and when) in a way that changes the nature of how you work! It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made. Once a certain kind of very useful information -- that has always been available, but a bit inconveniently -- becomes like running water out of the tap, it enables ways of working that just wouldn't have been practical before.

If you really want to know what Linus is talking about from the man himself, watch this Google Tech Talk. It's over an hour, but there's nothing like hearing it straight from the horse's mouth.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-219933204 4603874737&q=git+google+tech+talk&total=3&start=0& num=10&so=3&type=search&plindex=1 [google.com]

Re:PARADIGM SHIFT!

Damnit, it's a paradigm shift that Linus is talking about. True distributed source code management brings an entirely new way of working. It enables very fast merging at a very fine granularity, which lets you use casually use this information (about what changed and when) in a way that changes the nature of how you work! It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made. Once a certain kind of very useful information -- that has always been available, but a bit inconveniently -- becomes like running water out of the tap, it enables ways of working that just wouldn't have been practical before.

You know, that sounds so much like an advertorial! Would you care to provide a little bit of original analysis to go with your otherwise-unleavened hype? In exactly what way does a distributed source code management system change the way you work? (Remember, some of us have been using 'cvs annotate' and 'svn blame' over high-bandwidth networks for a long time now.) While you're at it, do distinguish between the various aspects (e.g. multiple repositories vs. braided versioning) even if one really implies the other.

And do try to go easy on the phrase "paradigm shift" in your explanation even if this is one; marketdroids love over-using it and it's come to be a code phrase for "same old, same old". Focus on how things have changed for you and you'll get a better response.

Re:PARADIGM SHIFT!

In exactly what way does a distributed source code management system change the way you work?

It gives you private branches and commits, which allow you to work with the power of a VCS, but without having to pollute the main repo with dead ends, poorly written changes, and experiments. It also allows for true disconnected operation, and allows any developer to "pull" from another developer, again without having to pollute the master repository.

And specifically with git vs. SVN, git offers true branches and tags (unlike SVN's bizarre, nonsensical "simulations"), and true merges.

And do try to go easy on the phrase "paradigm shift" in your explanation even if this is one; marketdroids love over-using it and it's come to be a code phrase for "same old, same old". Focus on how things have changed for you and you'll get a better response.

It (git and distributed VCS) is a "paradigm shift" the same way that, say, the relational model is a paradigm shift over the network model. It generalizes the problem and strips it down to certain fundamental concepts, and makes those concepts available to you directly, instead of under a layer of ill-conceived and limited operators.

For instance, in SVN, how do you move a changeset from the tip of one branch to another? You can't. It's not allowed by the model, even though in terms of more fundamental operations, it's easy to describe. But in git, you can. Just cherry pick it to the new branch, then move the tip of the old branch back one changeset (the "dangling" changeset on the old branch will eventually get garbage collected). You could also write your own "git-move-changeset" command using the existing low-level git commands.

Instead of considering the deeper, underlying issues, the SVN team just cloned CVS's behavior and made it cleaner. Too bad.

That's exactly what a "paradigm shift" is: finding the deeper, fundamental operations and then showing how the existing systems are just subsets of that functionality.

Re:PARADIGM SHIFT!

This is what's great about Linus Torvalds:

[me using random software]: 'This sucks. I could code something better in two weeks.' [false, or "true in theory, but I didn't do it"]

[Linus Torvalds using random software]: 'This sucks, and basically 99% of the software in this entire category sucks, for reasons X, Y and Z. I could code something better in two weeks.' [true; done]

Truly impressive. Whenever I start to think I've accomplished anything programming, I look at video like that (which was on reddit how long ago?) and realize once again that there are people who live on a different planet than I do.

LOLLINUS

(Linus with a little balloon on hovering over his head)
"Oh hi, i shiftedz ur paradigmses."

Paradigmses, he shifted them.

Re:Can't RTFA...

No Linus wrote Linux as a reimplementation of BSD, during the period that AT&T sued to stop the distribution of BSD. Had BSD not been held up in court, there would have been no need to rewrite BSD from scratch using inferior networking code.

Actually, if you read Linus' own book - Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary [amazon.com] - you'd find out that he wrote Linux as (a) a method for learning x86 Assembly for the i386 processor, (b) as a way to get into his school account over dial-up, and (c) as a re-implementation of Minix. It was also highly coupled with Minix for a while until around version 0.10, or shortly thereafter.

See also: 0.10 history [kerneltrap.org], 0.02 & 0.03 history [kerneltrap.org], 0.01 history [kerneltrap.org]

Re:Can't RTFA...

No Linus wrote Linux as a reimplementation of BSD

Actually Linus started out rewriting Minix as a hobby, and it just so happened he chose the right license and was good an getting people to work with him. It amazes me that after all this time there are still people who don't understand why Linux succeeded... it was by building a better community, not technical superiority. BSD has had a great technical history, but quite a few community problems, leading to community splits and forks. Linus, as a good manager, has managed to hold Linux together, which is an achievement in itself. Of course, with open source "win" and "lose" isn't that meaningful; Linux and *BSD are healthy and continuing in their development. Who cares if your community is the biggest, if your community develops the software you need.

during the period that AT&T sued to stop the distribution of BSD. Had BSD not been held up in court, there would have been no need to rewrite BSD from scratch using inferior networking code.

So, with the SCO suit, BSD was able to make a comeback, right? Or, maybe you are overestimating the impact of the lawsuit. Also, if the BSDs could not stick together, what makes you think all the Linux people could work with them? Theo and Linus sharing the same CVS repository?... I doubt it.

When Novell bought AT&T's Unix labs it ended the frivilous lawsuit against BSD, but by that time, Linux had gained so much marketing buzz that it overwhelmed both commercial Unix and the free BSD, serving to water down any hope for either of the candidates to prevent the expansion of Micorsoft's DOS and
the promise of NT and Cairo.

Except that the "frivolous" lawsuit actually did find offending code. The only thing that saved BSD is that AT&T/USL had stolen even more code. You can call the lawsuit stupid, annoying, or disrespectful, but there was an element of truth to it. The community should have policed itself a little bit better. To this day we still here software companies decrying open source's disrespect for copyright and properly policing the code; which IMNSHO is fallout from the original attitude taken when BSD was being developed. I like open source too, but the way to go about it isn't by ignoring the licenses for code, no matter how small or insignificant the amount. Hindsight is 20/20, but that was an important lesson.

By the end of the 90s, Unix vendors had mainly squabbled amongst themselves, BSD had been largely overlooked, and Linux had expended millions of dollars in efforts to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. That allowed Microsoft to take over the desktop.

This makes no sense to blame on Linux. The BSD license allowed commercial forks, so they happened, while BSD failed to market itself and grow its development community (instead it forked). Meanwhile Linux was doing its own thing, but was it "wrong" for not spending its funds on supporting BSD instead? If you look at all the money ever spent developing Linux, its probably less than what was spent on one of the major commercial Unixes. Why is this ok in the business world, but not in the open source world? Also, keep in mind a lot of recent investment in Linux is precisely because of the GPL; IBM would not support development of BSD code, as that might help its competitors closed-source products.

Meanwhile, Microsoft successfully marketed a desktop, and took over a market many feel a free Unix could have occupied. Of course, in that case you should blame X-Windows and the slow development of broadly supported GUI toolkits. Both of those run on both Linux and BSD, so I don't see why this should be blamed on Linux. I guess Linus should have written a BSD-licensed version of KDE to make you happy?

Once again, technical superiority is not the only thing that matters. It isn't true in business, and it isn't true in the open source world. Building a healthy community and a working development process is just as

Re:Can't RTFA...

Daniel, you're coming off like a fanboi. I love RD and all, but you're coming across like a Mactard trying to out piss Freetards.

Besides which, you're missing an important part of the equation: commodity software.

Re:Can't RTFA...

Technical superiority did win in BSD's case.

That's a pretty bold assumption not born out by the overall market [wowdailynews.com], if you define winning the way you have been.

While Linux is doing a lot in the server arena, it has accomplished very little on the desktop, despite efforts like OpenLinux and United Linux to create a standard Linux.

I'd argue that distributions such as Mandrake, Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS have done a lot more for the desktop, but certainly none have taken the overall market by storm.

The kernel may not have forked like Open/Net/FreeBSD, but there's really no difference between forked kernels and forked distros when it comes to fracturing the market.

There's a difference between duplication of effort spent packaging existing software (distros) versus developing kernels and supporting libraries from scratch, with only partial code sharing through the heroic efforts of programmers spanning parts of the BSD family. As time goes on, this is not going to get any easier, while standards such as LSB has made packaging on Linux quite a bit simpler.

There are really no commercial apps for Linux and there is no real market that will ever encourage their development.

On the desktop there are few, but there certainly are a lot of specialized professional apps available for Linux. For everyday use, I'd question how much that matters. Sure gaming is not in a good state, but its not much better on a Mac; Consoles are even beating Windows FWIW.

That leaves Apple's Mac OS as the only viable desktop, and its based on BSD, not Linux.

So, without a commercial software market, a desktop is not viable? I guess you're not really much of an open source person. I must be really good to have been using an unviable desktop exclusively for the last 8 years as a my desktop OS. Or just maybe there's a difference between "viable" and "market leader". As an obvious Mac fanboy, you should know the difference. A 90% market share for Windows hasn't stopped OS-X from being viable, except perhaps for gaming, and (at the whim of Microsoft) office productivity.

It does however share the same POSIX platform, meaning that there's really nothing of unique value in Linux that can't be ported to Mac OS X

So if OS-X sharing Posix is good, how are multiple Linux distributions following LSB fractured and broken? You're not being very consistent.

while there is lots of value associated with Mac OS X that will never make it to Linux: commercial apps, consumer focus, real marketing, retail support and the like.

None of those have anything to do with BSD or the Mac kernel. Commercial apps in Linux are nearly comparible to Mac (but not Windows). Consumer focused distributions exist (just about anyone can use PCLinuxOS or Linspire). Real marketing, well if you consider that an OS technical feature, it's hard to compete with Apple; They are better at marketing than engineering. Retail support exists just fine if you need it; Several Linux vendors are happy to support their products if you buy them.

Here's a value that will never come to Mac OS: Linux is Free. Obviously that doesn't matter to you, since you consider the GPL "an entaglement", and you don't even seem to care about open source (BSD) either, since most of the Mac OS advantages have nothing to do with anything that's open source.

It's not that code associated with Linux isn't a great contribution to technology, it's that it simply won't matter on the desktop.

It may not matter on your desktop, but it matters on mine (and works just fine). I use Linux at home, on my laptop, and at work. That's relevant enough for me. Unlike some, I do not value my OS software based solely on how many other people are using it (how unfashionable!). I would like to see Linux used widely, but I don't feel it has "failed" unles

Re:Can't RTFA...

Did he slam it, or did he say that it's fine, just not appropriate for a project as distributed as the kernel?

The former. I was able to load the article, but can't get it back now. He said something like it's "good enough" for many people, but no one's really excited about SVN. To me, that's crap. SVN does what it does very well. What more could you really want from a centrally-managed versioning system?

Re:Other subversion flaws

You've apparently not worked with NFS. Simply setting a username on your NFS client with the same UID as the user on the server allows access to all those contents of the the "chmod 700" home directory and .ssh directory. NFS is commonly known as "No Fucking Security" for a number of powerful historifcal reasons, most especially this one.

You're also apparently trapped by the same error as the Subversion authors have made. You think the local disabling of permissions to read the data means that someone locally cannot actually read the plain text passwords. Other means for access include:

* Booting with a live CD to access every file on the local drive.

* Getting fools to run a USB device on Windows systems (which doesn't accss the TortoiseSVN stored passwords, but can easily access SSH keys and passwords stored under CygWin)

* Removing hard drives for duplication (apparently a common practice in European hotels before international conferences, where thieves enjoy quite a lot of easy nabbing of passwords or even industrial espionage)

* Accessing backup tapes (an extremely popular hobby for both amateur and professional system crackers)

Setting the permissions to 700 keeps out only the most casual and polite of attackers. It's generally no more effective than putting a deadbolt on a screen door.

Re:Can't RTFA...

I used to use CVS (and still do for some projects). Then I switched over to SVN. It was remarkably unremarkable.

Then, a few months ago, there was a /. article on git [git.or.cz]. It sounded interesting so I tried it... and was thoroughly impressed.

I was up and running in about 20 minutes. You can use cvs/svn like commands, *but* you get local / decentralized repositories with fast forking and merging.

Start a project. Type "git init" and you've got a repository in place (you don't have to initialize and then check it out). "git add ." and "git commit" and you've got your first revision.

It took a little bit more effort to figure out how to push/pull from a remote repository, but it's fairly straightforward. A bunch of people can work in a group, have their own local repositories, and then merge their changes (along with the revision history). It's awesome.

The only reason I haven't switched all of my projects over to it is that the IDEs I use (Xcode and Eclipse) don't have good git integration (as far as I know).

Re:Can't RTFA...

He did slam CVS indeed, SVN likewise. In Linux talk at Google about Git [google.com][video] he mentions SVN and their credo at on time being something along the line of "CVS done right", commenting that "there is no way to do CVS right."

The article linked here is light on details concerning SCM, though.

Re:Can't RTFA...

Site seems to be back up, here is what he had to say:

I suspect a lot of people really don't much like CVS, so I didn't really even expect anybody to argue that CVS was really anything but a legacy system. And while I've gotten a few people who argued that I shouldn't have been quite so impolite against SVN (and hey, that's fair -- I'm really not a very polite person!), I don't think anybody actually argued that SVN was 'good'.

SVN is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it. But very few people are 'proud' of it, or excited about it.

And here is the reaction from the subversion team [tigris.org]. For those of you who don't want to RTFA, they basically say they agree, its not appropriate for something like Linux.

BTW, isn't this all old news? His original comment on subversion was dated from 05

Re:Can't RTFA...

Yes this is extremely old news. I thought it would be something new, but then I see the comment from the SVN guys is dated 2006: last year for people who keep track of time.

For instance, the comment from the Subversion team states that they hope the kernel dev team find some VCS that they like. They already did and it was git (http://git.or.cz/), a program that Linus Torvalds wrote himself.

As a side comment, I like git over Subversion for a number of reasons. First it has data verification in the form of checking SHA1 (note that this isn't for repository protection from attacks but just for verification from corruption). It's distributed, and doesn't blow up the repository size when the repository gets large. SVN keeps a .svn metadata folder in each normal directory; hence if you have 1000 normal directories you get 2000 directories.

Even if that's not much of an increase in space, it's ugly and it makes the repository (just files) hard to copy (have no idea why they implemented it this way). Of course there's a backup feature in the program so there's no reason to copy by hand, but still, it's inelegant.

Linus would not be pleased...

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 182) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction. /efytimes/lefthome.asp, line 193

Re:Linus would not be pleased...

Look at the script... lefthome.asp! Thats what i would do if I had my site running on Microshit stuff.

Re:Linus would not be pleased...

and if you're a programmer or an admin that knows sql server, then you know to disable this before you go into production. again, this is not a problem with the product. saying such would be like saying solaris is trash because it enables everything plus the kitchen sink, unless you tell it not to...

oracle is all great and fun if you have the money to cough up for it. sql server has great performance at a fraction of oracle's cost. of course, a competent architect will know when to use sql server and when to use oracle.

GPL Comment

I hereby release this comment under a GPL. You are free to use this comment or modify this comment in away you feel fit. But if you distribute this comment or any modifications of it, you need to also publish all the embarrassing things you have said said drunk.

Article

Sunday, August 19, 2007: Did Microsoft's Men In Black ever met Linus Torvalds? But why is he so critical of GPLv3? Why does he slam Subversion? What would happen to the kernel development if he chooses to do something else more important? These are some of the questions Linux/open source community from around the globe wanted to ask Linus. And, here is Linus candid and blunt, and at times diplomatic. Check if the question you wanted to ask to the father of Linux is here and what does he have to say...
Q: What are the future enhancements/paths/plans for the Linux kernel? --Subramani R

Linus: I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.

So I really don't have any great vision for what the kernel will look like in five years -- just a very general plan to make sure that we keep our eye on the ball. In fact, when it comes to me personally, one of the things I worry about the most isn't even the technical issues, but making sure that the 'process' works, and that people can work well with each other.

Q: How do you see the relationship of Linux and Solaris evolving in the future? How will it benefit the users?

Linus: I don't actually see a whole lot of overlap, except that I think Solaris will start using more of the Linux user space tools (which I obviously don't personally have a lot to do with -- I really only do the kernel). The Linux desktop is just so much better than what traditional Solaris has, and I expect Solaris to move more and more towards a more Linux-like model there.

On the pure kernel side, the licensing differences mean that there's not much cooperation, but it will be very interesting to see if that will change. Sun has been making noises about licensing Solaris under the GPL (either v2 or v3), and if the licence differences go away, that could result in some interesting technology. But I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude to that.

Q: Now that the GPLv3 has been finalised and released, do you foresee any circumstance that would encourage you to begin moving the kernel to it? Or, from your perspective, is it so bad that you would never consider it? -- Peter Smith / Naveen Mudunuru.

Linus: I think it is much improved over the early drafts, and I don't think it's a horrible licence. I just don't think it's the same kind of 'great' licence that the GPLv2 is.

So in the absence of the GPLv2, I could see myself using the GPLv3. But since I have a better choice, why should I?

That said, I try to always be pragmatic, and the fact that I think the GPLv3 is not as good a licence as the GPLv2 is not a 'black and white' question. It's a balancing act. And if there are other advantages to the GPLv3, maybe those other advantages would be big enough to tilt the balance in favour of the GPLv3.

Quite frankly, I don't really see any, but if Solaris really is to be released under the GPLv3, maybe the advantage of avoiding unnecessary non-compatible licence issues could be enough of an advantage that it might be worth trying to re-license the Linux kernel under the GPLv3 too.

Don't get me wrong -- I think it's unlikely. But I do want to make it clear that I'm not a licence bigot, per se. I think the GPLv2 is clearly the better licence, but licences aren't everything.

After all, I use a lot of programs that are under other licences. I might not put a project I start myself under the BSD (or the X11-MIT) licence, but I think it's a great licence, and for other projects it may well be the right one.

Q: Currently are there any Indians who you'd like to highlight as key contributors to the Linux kernel?

Linus: I have to admit that I don't directly work with anybody that I actually realize as being from India. That said, I should clarify a bit: I've very consciously tried

Re:Article

I'd assume it's just that most people don't know about Git.

It just needs a new PR guy and a little bit of time.

I'd say it's at least in part due to lack of Windows support. Love it or hate it, you don't become the world's foremost anything by ignoring Windows. As can be seen here: http://git.or.cz/#download [git.or.cz] the developers seem to view "cross-platform" as meaning "We got both kinds! RPMs and debs!".

There is a partially functional git port in Cygwin, but it doesn't really work as far as I can tell, and it certainly isn't mentioned anywhere on the Git home page. I wanted to like Git, but unfortunately it seems to not be ready for widespread use on the most popular desktop operating system in the world. I'd be happy to try it again someday when it is.

Compare with SVN or Mercurial or Monotone or most any other SCM system. Most of the others all feature prominent download links on the home page for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Re:Article

Subversion works, but like Linus says, it's nothing wonderful. You can hardly point at some feature of it and say it was the product of a genius. It does CVS right, and that's about it.

But SVN is limiting. For example I have a fork of the Second Life source, and SVN was PAIN for that. I ended up switching to SVK because it was the first thing I found that could sync with a SVN repository (which is what LL hosts), but Git would probably be also a fine choice as well.

SVN's problem is that when you want to branch somebody's source but still follow it by merging improvements it becomes really painful. You have to use svn-load-dirs, which is a hack. You have to give it megabytes of source to process, which can suck really badly when you've got your SNV repository hosted externally so that other people can access it.

Alternate link

This one is not (yet) slashdotted:
http://www.efytimes.com/archive/144/news.htm [efytimes.com]

OMG Transaction Svr Killed Microsoft! You Bastard!

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 666) was summoned by an evil deadlocked process in order to lock up and throw away the key to any IT resources process to request any reasonable requirement for open source software chosen by the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction with Microsoft products next time and this threat will disappear into thin air - Steve Balmer, Head Deadlocker.

Article Summary Misleading

This article is only slightly about Subversion. A couple paragraphs from the whole thing! They talk about "the plan" for the Kernel, outsourcing to India (they talk a lot about India actually), and other crap. I got bored half way through and just searched for the subversion part, which even then wasn't that interesting.

Re:Article Summary Misleading

Think that could be because its an Indian news site and the guy himself is Indian?

Believe it or not, just because something is published on the world wide web doesn't mean it has to cut out everything of local interest.

BitKeeper vs. SVN

My project recently switched from BitKeeper (Torvalds preferred system before the license issues) to SVN. BitKeeper is a nice system and I think it is better if you have a good development process. For my project with less than 10 developers and with a loose process, SVN is the better tool. SVN allows updates to single files and this really comes in handy whereas BitKeeper forces _everything_ as atomic changesets. For example, if a global.h in the trunk gets updated with new parameters and I only want to incorporate the changes to this file in a branch, it is no problem. But in BitKeeper, I could only make this update if a) the changes to global.h where the only changes in the ChangeSet, and b) if no other changesets were pushed prior to the trunk. BitKeeper does *not* allow cherry-picking of Changesets. I've tried doing so with scripts and patch files, but it is messy at best.

Please stop with flamebat summaries

Linus isn't slamming SVN and he responses very insightful why he things git is better. Please, stop this propaganda style summary writing, it is getting very old.

Nevermind that, interview was ok, not lot of new info, but much calmer and clever Linus than last months.

Oh come on

I love penis. Frankly the batcave scares me.

43 comments already and nobody found that funny?

Important Differences

As to my 'iconic image', I tend to dislike that part personally. I'm not a great public speaker, and I've avoided travelling for the last several years because I'm not very comfortable being seen as this iconic 'visionary'. I'm just an engineer, and I just happen to love doing what I do, and to work with other people in public.

This, people, is the key difference between Linux and Microsoft, and even Apple. Steves Ballmer and Jobs both want to be seen as visionaries, as all-knowing technological sages of our time. That isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as we've seen with the way Jobs has turned Apple around since he took over, but it does explain the difference between the philosophies of the groups: Apple and Microsoft take the approach of throwing new features in whenever they find them, so as to be seen as forward-thinking and 'next-gen', and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't - Spotlight being an example of something that does work (yeah, there had been desktop search before, but nothing quite that efficient and right-on-the-desktop in what can be called the 'Big 3' operating systems), and things like the are-they-in, are-they-out dropped features from Vista being an example of something that doesn't.

Linux, however, taking it's cues from Linus, approaches things from an engineering perspective. Visionary? That's all well and good, but will it run the risk of breaking? Yes? Then it's not going in. When you don't have a product to sell, it's a lot easier to base your development priorites on a more sound engineering base. Therein lies the difference; Jobs and Ballmer see themselves as visionaries, while Linus - who, whether he likes it or not, is the 'spiritual leader' of the Linux community - sees himself as 'just an engineer'. (Of course, the point could be made that Linus has the luxury of only being concerned with the kernel, where security and stability are the key things and form over function is rarely if ever required - do the likes likes of Mark Shuttleworth, Matthew Szulik, etc see themselves as engineers, or as visionaries?)

Not everyone is a Linux kernel developer

Can't read the article linked as it's being slashdotted but I saw the talk he did at Google [google.com] and I have to say that he missed two big points:

1. Need support for the most diffused platforms (most you can get on Windows is a supposedly non-performing Cygwin version)
2. Need support for actual user interfaces other than "command line"

..many people need to version binaries, and many need a simple user interface.
In fact one of the handicaps of SVN is that it doesn't have a client like WinCVS. TortoiseSVN works nice, but most users just want a separate app.

So he can make his point as much as he wants, but there is a reason why 5000 employees at Google base their work on Perforce and not on GIT.

ole'

Why Indians Don't Contribute Much to Linux

``Q: India is one of the major producers of software engineers, yet we don't contribute much to the Linux domain. What do you think is keeping Indians from becoming proactive on that front? How do you feel we could encourage Indians to get involved and contribute heavily? You have a fan following in India; could your iconic image be used to inspire enthusiasts? -- Bhuvaneswaran Arumugam.

Linus: This is actually a very hard question for me to answer. Getting into open source is such a complicated combination of both infrastructure (Internet access, education, you name it), flow of information and simply culture that I can't even begin to guess what the biggest stumbling block could be.''

My guess is it's because the _bulk_ of Indian software engineers are being raised on Microsoft technology (the fact that it's Microsoft is irrelevant here; what matters is that it isn't Linux and doesn't resemble Linux). I don't actually know that this is the case, but I suspect it. I've spoken to a number of people from various parts of the world that aren't Europe or North America, and the picture I get is mostly the same: virtually everybody who uses a computer uses (cheap or pirated) Windows, if you take classes in CS you are taught Microsoft tools, and, at work, you use Windows. It's like nothing else exists. Why would you contribute to Linux, coming from such an environment?

Also, I know for a fact that a lot of people in India get trained on Java. That's yet another platform that isn't Linux and, even if it's more like Linux than Microsoft's platform is, it's still different in important ways. Besides, Java can run under Linux...but that's not what usually happens.

Linus admits he's a troll

I like making strong statements, because I find the discussion interesting.

Isn't that another way of saying "I am a troll?"

Not only good, but also easy enough!

He's right about Subversion, but he misses one point:

Putting your project in a Subversion repository takes an hour or two, maybe half a day if you're an idiot. Setting up an arch repository took me at least twice as long. Explaining how to use arch to developers who hadn't worked with it before is an order of magnitude more difficult than explaining Subversion to developers who haven't worked with it before.

Subversion is "good enough", but it's also simple, straightforward and frankly if you have anything that goes beyond a very simple project or where more than one person is involved, I can't think of many reasons to not put it into a Subversion repository.

I still like arch more for the concepts. But I don't use it. I might look at git one of those days, if I have a need Subversion doesn't address.

So negative

Perhaps slightly off topic, but I realize now that I'm always compelled to read stories with Linus' name because I'm a fan (not fanboy) and user of Linux. However, the man never seems to have anything positive to say. Really, is his opinion all that relevant anymore? Of course he will always be somewhat relevant due to the fact he is pretty much in charge of the kernel and contributes heavily to it, not to mention the trademark holder of Linux, but in the end he really has to answer to the community. He has to know he can't ever bite the hand that feeds him or people will go other directions.

I'm not trying to troll or insight a flame war, I'm just saying his curmudgeonly ways are getting a bit old already. At some point I imagine him being viewed as the Dvorak of Linux. Anyway, I'll understand if I get modded down, I just wanted to put my opinion in even if it's not worth much.

well, here's my take on the Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it.

Solaris Desktop

The Linux desktop is just so much better than what traditional Solaris has, and I expect Solaris to move more and more towards a more Linux-like model there.

Linus seems unaware that the preferred desktop on Solaris is now a rebranded version of GNOME.

From someone who's actually used git...

I used git for about three weeks at work, importing the entire SVN repository at work into git. It was pretty nice having the entire repository history on my local machine, and I was able to do cool stuff like running a blame on the entire repository and finding out who was responsible for what percentage of the code base -- and running this was pretty fast (it would have taken forever on a traditional source code control system like subversion).

I used the git-svn bridge, which allows you to use a subversion repository to sync into your local git repository, so that everyone else can use subversion while you use git and merge back and forth. This worked really well, and merging things was extremely easy, like Linus says.

Unfortunately the biggest problem with git, at least for a group with a fairly structured development process (i.e., everyone commits into the same main repository) is that git has no sense of a timeline. Well, actually, it does, but you have to use this GUI tool to view where branch merges and such happen so you can figure out what hash to pass in when you want to check out a specific associated subversion revision number. Part of the advantage of subversion is that the revision numbers increment, and it's easy to tell if you have a file that is from an older revision along with some other directories checked out from a newer revision. Another advantage is that it's a lot easier to type in a revision number (which is usually some five or six digit number) than a SHA-1 hash. For example if a bug happens in revision 56384, I can tell a coworker to update to 56384, and that's easy. This is a lot easier than yelling across the hallway, "it's in 832e76a9899f560a90ffd62ae2ce83bbeff58f54." This would require an IM or an e-mail at the least.

In general I think a lot of projects have a timeline where code develops and becomes better and more complex, and most developers want to have the latest source. In these situations git is just very difficult to deal with, because it is not really designed with this idea in mind.

Just "Linus"?

I love how Slashdot is the kind of site where one can refer in a subject *and* the article summary itself to just "Linus" and we all know who the person's talking about.

386BSD and licensing

From what I recall as both a Linux and BSD hack at the time, the boost to Linux was the earlier addition of an IDE interface, not licensing. BSD required a (more expensive and thus more rare) SCSI controller for much longer which limited the number of users (which then had some effect on developers).

Same for partitioning, to this day BSD still requires a primary partition, which means potentially more trouble for users to install.

... bye bye karma ...

Just a question, not trying to flame really, but why does anyone care what Linus thinks? I like using OSS, I wrote OSS libaries myself. But honestly, why should I care what Linus thinks? It's a community effort. Not like he wrote the entire kernel, let alone 100s of libraries I use each day.

great comment...

I like his comment about "rotating" media. What a disdainful term that will become. It immediately made me picture my nine-yr-old son teasing me in 10 years because I still have stuff on my lame rotating media.

I love Linus as much as the next geek.

But here's an honest question.

If a person refuses to use a given technology, how can he meaningfully criticize that same technology? Give me a guy who's been using CVS for a decade and wants to vent, and I'll listen.

Re:Oh please....

Who really gives a flying hoot what Linus thinks anymore?

Only people interested in the kernel I suppose. Personally I think people who name non-gnu projects with a gnu in front of the name may have a slight bias against him due to the LiGnuX naming debacle and the repeat with the gnu prefix. Thus the "flying hoot" can be forgiven and understood. Just put up with him even if he has different views on GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - it's not some huge heresy.

Re:SVN vs. CVS

I've never used git on any project big enough to have multiple developers, but I use git for my one-man-projects for the simple fact that it's so easy to create a repository.

Simply move the directory you're working in and type 'git init' and you're off and running. If you're developing the same code on multiple machines, it's simple to develop on them independently and still sync relevant changes. Frustrating.

With SVN, you have to set up a central repository (not difficult, but tedious) and if you're working with the code on multiple machines that aren't always on the same network you either have to have a SVN repository on each one and manage syncing them somehow, or one machine can't make commits when the other isn't on the network. Frustrating.

I still find git to be a little confusing (especially in regards to warnings seen when pushing or pulling changes from one repository to another and merging branches), but I've decided that even if git isn't the best answer, a distributed version control system is closer to the Right Thing than the old way of doing it (for my purposes, at least).

Who cares?

Err ... who might be interested in hearing from Linus?

- anybody who likes to hear an opinion that's usually sensible, well thought-through, honest, and devoid of humbug?

- someone who is interested in hearing from the guy who succeeds in maintaining sufficient technical credit to have the likes of Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, and a raft of others you've never heard about listen to him?

- people who think that the ideas of a fellow whose ideas proved fruitful might be interesting?

Come to think of it ... why would anyone care about what Bill Gates thinks? Apart from him still being one of the sharpest cookies in the industry that is. Why indeed? The money he has to spend? Is that your criterion?

Re:Site is slashdotted

Yes, slashdotted: but not a bandwidth/clients problem, but a horrible programming error, it seems.

Re:SVN vs. CVS

Both do their job (CVS since years). SVN does some trivial things better than CVS.

SVN doesn't do the job because there's no built-in merge tracking, which leads to serious merge bugs.

Repeated merges (bi-directional merges) between branches generates false positives (the lack of merge tracking causes SVN to re-merge previously merged code.) The lack of true renames, means that you can lose changes during a merge if renamed files are modified on both branches. The svnmerge.py script only works at one directory level, which makes merging a single file deep in the project annoying. Since a checkin and a merge checkin are identical, there's no way to enforce merge tracking standards via hooks. All of these merge weaknesses require extra training and/or merge meisters, which is really clumsy in a large organization.

SVN is useful if you only use short lived branches (which will minimize the problems listed above.) I would not use it for large organizations due to training issues, nor for branches that require lots of inter-branch merging.

Hopefully, the merge tracking being implemented for SVN 1.5 will make SVN a real/complete scource code control system.

Re:Site is slashdotted

But it is some much more fun commenting on the opensource community from the outside :)

P.S. I always found SQL Server weird. Originally coded my Sybase, but much lower performance. It is almost like the goal on the MS side, was to slow it down once the source changed hands, weird.

Re:Oh please....

Who cares? People who need Torvalds to think for them. One problem is the first name convention which has the effect of elevating him to somebody special. Impartial people should only use "Linus" by itself only when it would be appropriate for anyone else. Another problem are the contradictions in his widely publicized opinions. E.g., on the one hand, on other occasions he likes to hold up kernel development as akin to science. OTOH, he and his fanboys tout his blunt style as sometimes encouraging strong rebuttals, as if progress requires a blunt style. That's not at all borne out in the history of science and engineering.

Another problem with his blunt style is how what he considers good is synonymous with what he considers good for the kernel: e.g., git is good for the kernel, therefore, Torvalds concludes, git is the best. It is very likely that at this point, other considerations make other RCS's better than git for the vast majority of projects. Another example is how the GPLv3 prevents something that Torvalds supports--Tivoization. Therefore, he claims, GPLv3 is worse than GPLv2 for the kernel, and thus, he falsely concludes, GPLv3 is worse than GPLv2 in general. GPLv3 may very well be worse than GPLv2, but the only people for whom he has observed it to be true, are those who believe that Tivoization of the Linux kernel should be allowed. But Torvalds always tries to elevate that group to somehow matter more than others.

Re:Indians in open source

that makes me pine for the good old days when comp.lang.c et alia were filled with students asking for solutions to their homework.

Re:Site is slashdotted

No. They are just using some bad methodologies for updating the database each time an article is read. Given the variety of places I see errors happening, it appears they are hitting the database many times over the course of constructing one page, and are updating something in the database for each one of those hits in a way that requires a transaction lock. They'd have the same problem on a database run on Linux if they don't change the way they use the database. It's an architecture design problem.

Re:Indians in open source

When there's demand, interest and available skills then there will be Indians doing open source development.

It's open source, there's no restrictions (other than English as a language?) on any nation working on Linux or open source projects, it will happen.

It's all about people skills and programming skills, if you can program well, you can accept you don't know everything and listen to others then you'll do well. Also you suggest changes you know will make a difference, changes you've tested and have proven results, not something you read on a website.

Re:Oh please....

Linus Torvalds has managed one of the most successful software development programmes ever witnessed and, with git, has sped development up by 2 times or more on the most complexly structured, most variable development team I've ever heard about.

If all you do is democode then Linus doesn't matter, for everybody else his opinion really counts.

Just a student with homework

Look at what he says: "I am developing an application for PDA and require a light-weight browser for it..."

ie. his boss has told him to find something they can steal.

Nope, he's coming from iiitb.ac.in - the Indian Institue of Information Technology's graduate school in Bangalore. He's trying to avoid doing his own thesis work.

Re:Linus isn't "Good Enough"

I think that Linus doesn't really care about Linux competing in the market place.

Re:Indians in open source

Nothing new or earth shattering here, but for some reason, said w. b.'s have developed the skill of 'asking people on mailing lists to do their work for them' as a substitute for real work.

I don't know what w.b.s are, but I have noticed many inappropriate newsgroup and mailing list questions from Indians that show more of a desire (or desperate need) to offload work than a need for assistance with a particular question.

I also get the feeling with many of those questions that the developer is hopelessly out of his depth. Must be a management issue -- hire cheap people who desperately need a job, then drop impossible tasks on them and watch them scramble. I'm sure it's satisfying if your measurement of management success is paying somebody almost nothing to work his ass off day and night, but I can't imagine that it ever results in usable software.

Yeah..

Because I've _never_ seen a MySQL error from some random online forum.

Re:Site is slashdotted

Next time I should consider adding a smiley face.... So much for my attempt to make a joke.

It is funny to have four comments on a post marked as "Redundant"

Re:Linus Slams Big Macs, prefers Double

tjstork wrote:
> Good God. People are pathetic, listening to Linus as if he has great insights as to
> the mysteries of the universe. He's just a kernel developer that was in the right place
> at the right time to do the right thing.

AC wrote:
> to do the right thing? don't you mean to rip off the right thing? linus is the guy
> who made yet another version of unix and now people are acting like it's revolutionary.
> he didn't really bring anything new to the table.

Sorry guys, you posted in the wrong forum. Try www.windowsforum.org :)

Linus is treated with respect here because he supports his arguments with the reasoning behind them... something that many of us still struggle to do. At least that way you can know whether you disagree with his reasoning or his facts. Props, though, to tjstork for using his real ID to say this.