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Open Source Operating Systems Linux

Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him 323

pacopico writes: In a typically blunt interview, Linus Torvalds has said for the first time that if he were to die, Linux could safely continue on its own. Bloomberg has the report, which includes a video with Torvalds at his home office. Torvalds insists that people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have taken over huge parts of the day-to-day work maintaining Linux and that they've built up enough trust to be respected. This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude. The line between "blunt" and "aggressive" is one that you probably get to skirt a lot, when you (in the words of the Bloomberg reporter) "may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years."
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Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him

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  • Were to die? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @12:33PM (#49922681) Homepage

    if he were to die

    I pretty much thought that death was the only thing guaranteed in life. Except for taxes, obviously.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @12:37PM (#49922717)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jacksonai ( 604950 )
      It seems strange to me that with all the decentralization in software (ex. git) that Linus remains the sole gatekeeper for what goes or doesn't go in the kernel. Splitting up the responsibility seems like it would be infinitely more logical. I mean now, if Linus goes on a trip, he either has to work on the release while on vacation, or delay it till he gets back. Seems like a large burden for one person to bear.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Who else is qualified? I wouldn't trust 99% of software people to make decisions. Linux is good and successful because of Linus. Full stop. He is worth 10,000 Slowaris or AIX engineers.

        • Umm, how about the people Linus mentioned that would carry on his work once he dies? Greg Kroah-Hartman, and some of the other maintainers would be excellent candidates.
      • by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @12:55PM (#49922879)

        I mean now, if Linus goes on a trip, he either has to work on the release while on vacation, or delay it till he gets back. Seems like a large burden for one person to bear.

        But it doesn't have to be that way. If Linus is on vacation, and something gets delayed for a week or two, so what? If Linus was in a coma for 3 months, so what? It's not the end of the world. It's not like he has to produce a new build or approve a new patch every 47 seconds to keep the world from exploding.

        • I mean now, if Linus goes on a trip, he either has to work on the release while on vacation, or delay it till he gets back. Seems like a large burden for one person to bear.

          But it doesn't have to be that way. If Linus is on vacation, and something gets delayed for a week or two, so what? If Linus was in a coma for 3 months, so what? It's not the end of the world. It's not like he has to produce a new build or approve a new patch every 47 seconds to keep the world from exploding.

          Agreed. But delaying the work doesn't make it go away. It will be there when he gets back, which means more work to do for the release, or features get delayed. Decentralizing would ensure the project can move forward, regardless of Linus's schedule.

        • "It's not like he has to produce a new build or approve a new patch every 47 seconds to keep the world from exploding."

          BLASPHEMY!!! You can expect the inquisitors to arrive shortly.

        • It's not like he has to produce a new build or approve a new patch every 47 seconds to keep the world from exploding.

          Is this the next season of 24?

      • At some point, someone has to make the decision. It is simply too important to be left to a comity. Design by comity leads to a real mess...
      • by buchner.johannes ( 1139593 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:40PM (#49923279) Homepage Journal

        It seems strange to me that with all the decentralization in software (ex. git) that Linus remains the sole gatekeeper for what goes or doesn't go in the kernel. Splitting up the responsibility seems like it would be infinitely more logical.

        It is already largely decentralized. There is a relatively fixed set of subsystem maintainers, which collect patches and merge from contributors. Then there are top figures like Greg and Linus, and the individual Linux distributions which maintain their own kernels by merging across. All Linus really does (well, he probably does more) is take and drop patches and every other week declare a certain merge set a version. Anyone can do that for their own kernel, but the central naming makes it "Linux" and focussed (e.g. for bug reporting).

        That's at least my understanding.

      • Because it is still his project, but more importantly it is his name and reputation associated with it.

      • by ron_ivi ( 607351 )

        Linus remains the sole gatekeeper for what goes or doesn't go in the kernel

        He isn't.

        You're free to release your kernel with whatever patches you want to approve or reject just as much as Linus can.

        In fact - just about every major distro works that way - applying not necessarily the exact same set of patches that Linus does.

        Of course many people trust Linus, so most distros follow him pretty closely.

        But that's because people trust him - not that he's some magical "Gatekeeper".

      • Splitting up the responsibility seems like it would be infinitely more logical.

        It seems to have escaped a lot of people here that regardless of what they think about his personality, he has done a great job of maintaining that kernel. I doubt most others have quite the same aptitude.

      • Linus doesn't seem to be setting the direction of the Kernel.

        As long as the commit isn't total crap and is something that belongs in a kernel, and is submitted during a merge window, he will merge it. At least, that is how I view it as an outsider.

        The Linux kernel is mostly written by huge corporations with divergent interests. There is no way Linus can herd them.

      • Honestly, it seems that you do not understand the model here. There actually are many competing versions of the kernel. Everyone voluntarily chooses to use the version that Linus has "blessed" but at any time, someone could, and some do, choose to use a different version "blessed" by someone else.

        In short, there is nobody forcing anyone to use the Linus version. Everyone who chooses to do so, does so of their own free will. If Linus were to die tomorrow, there would be some confusion as some would choose on

    • by bulled ( 956533 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:01PM (#49922915)

      Cultivate a hobby. For me i moved into management as one is apt to do, and learned how to make soap.

      Poster is forgetting the first rule.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Who is irked? People trying to dump tons of garbage into the mailing lists?

    The goal of linus should be to encourage coders to contribute to Linux. Could he do better? I'm sure. But he has done amazingly well so far (service / cloud side / aws / even android had a basis in linux) - linux is huge.

    The one BIG missed opportunity in Linux though I think was around wakelocks. That would have really helped connect the google kernel team into development. That's led to a real fork with android and in the long run

  • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @12:42PM (#49922763)

    Linus has stuff online from the early nineties forward, and, to be perfectly honest, any opinion piece of his is 1000% amazing. I've never tried to search it all out and read it over coffee or anything, but slashdotters linking to anything he's ever said is one of my absolute favorite things about this place.

    The BEST ones are where he's polite to someone who claims to know The True Path. The other amazing ones include the people who jump around screaming how Intel is about to die off and RISC will demolish CISC and all these other See The Future Guys. Basically, the standard crew of Tech Pope and his friend, the Tech Oracle... but we can view their ludicrous claims in the light of history. So you get to see Linus talk, and be nice, and they ramp up their crap to browbeat him, and eventually he just fucking OWNS them, drops the mic... and a 1-2 decades later we can be like "oh, looks like Linus was right to be polite at first, right to stick to his guns, right to switch gears from politeness, and right about all of that".

    Linus will ultimately be legend.

    It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P

    • by GNious ( 953874 )

      It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P

      I've seen pictures of Linus, and I've seen HBO ... Not sure I'd enjoy the intersection of Linus Torvalds and Gratuitous Boobs.

      • He might enjoy that intersection though. I know I would.

      • It is a joke that there isn't an HBO series about him already :P

        I've seen pictures of Linus, and I've seen HBO ... Not sure I'd enjoy the intersection of Linus Torvalds and Gratuitous Boobs.

        It wouldn't be Linus - it would be someone like Brad Pitt or Mark Wahlberg. Of course, the actor would wear glasses to take on a "nerd" persona.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @12:42PM (#49922769)

    You mean the butthurt from the poetterix crew for getting flak for their own poor attitude, crap code, and generally poor disposition?

    I think we need Linus a bit more to keep a lid on these... less than stellarly performing artifacts sticking in the community's craw.

  • We should move Linux to D.
  • by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:08PM (#49922963) Homepage

    Honestly being blunt and aggressive is how you don't end up with a steaming pile of crap.

    Being all wishy washy and nice is not how you get things done, you crush egos mercilessly when you have facts in hand.

  • by chihowa ( 366380 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:08PM (#49922965)

    When Linus has been piped into the great dev-null in the sky, I for one will welcome Lennart Poettering as the new Emperor of Linux. We'll call it Lenux!

    What, too early to start a flame war?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:08PM (#49922967)

    This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude.

    Who?

    Honest to god, I'm asking: Which people?

    Are these 'people' software engineers contributing to the kernel? Are these 'people' being directly addressed and directly insulted by Linus? Are these 'people' attempting to submit subpar code to the kernel?

    Or are these who are more interested in 'safe spaces' in open source communities? Are these 'people' acting outraged because of their perception of what other people think about Linus says?

    I am disturbed by this brewing character assassination campaign targeted at Linus because he says things that might possibly hurt a person's feelings. Shame on the submitter (pacopico) for throwing around an accusation as if it's fact.

    We've been down this road for, what, 20 years? We know by now that if Linus says something mean, it's because a person has done or said something incompetent. The 'fix' is not for Linus to change his tone; the fix is for the recipient of the insult to not be incompetent.

    • Well - maybe he irks some of us, because he's not aggressive enough? There should be a little drama in a charismatic leader's life, shouldn't there? How 'bout an article about Linus kicking some sorry assed developer down three flights of stairs, and out the door? That would be cool. Then we could create a video game, titled "Kick the lame developer's ass". Or something like that.

      Or, I could just be experimenting with my new sarcasm font . . . .

  • Can linux survive? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MouseTheLuckyDog ( 2752443 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:22PM (#49923079)

    Yes but only if they get rid of Poettering and his crew first.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Linus' attitude is not 'aggressive.' It's completely unprofessional and undignified. The community will be better off without him.

  • by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @02:06PM (#49923549)

    ... For all he is... including his bluntness which bruises the precious egos of the special snowflakes. Sometimes you need to be able to call someone a moron. There are too many of them to waste any more time on them than that.

  • by Loopy ( 41728 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @02:17PM (#49923661) Journal

    I wonder: would the same people that advocated the "calling females 'bossy' = sexist" view use consistent logic and assert that calling males "aggressive" is code for "I'm basically unable to defend my own position, am losing the argument, and therefore must apply guile and ad hominem attacks to stand my ground?" Be honest, now.

    Is how someone interprets your criticism of their work defined by how much face they stand to lose if they're wrong, regardless of whether the criticism is grounded in facts and experience?

  • Given how many submitters will submit an article with a comment of "He said X! He said X! Definitely gonna be nothing but X!" and the article actually says "Not X at all! Definitely not X! Anything but X! Never gonna be X!", I'm impressed that nobody submitted the article and said one of the following:

    1) Linus Torvald's death is imminent.
    2) Linus says he's going to kill himself.
    3) Linux says Linux is doomed once he dies.
  • My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.

    Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.

    Maybe the

  • He's always been aggressive and blunt. He's "irking more and more people" because those people want to take away what Linus has and he's not about to let them.

  • greg k-h is a shill (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sml42 ( 4150633 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @04:00PM (#49924637)
    i no longer trust greg k-h: at the last (last but one?) merge window he was aggressively pushing for kdbus inclusion. as far as i'm concerned he nothing but kay's shill now. what trust he built up over many years by maintaining 2.4 branch, usb core etc... he has completely blown by aggressively pushing for kdbus inclusion i cannot believe no-one has called him out in public for this behaviour. if you are reading this greg: sorry, but your name is dirt now, and you shoudl just hang up your keyboard and call it a day: no-one should trust you now.
  • by stox ( 131684 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @04:40PM (#49924939) Homepage

    You always know what he thinks.

    Put the cards on the table, figure out which ones are good. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    A smart man wants to know when he is wrong.

  • by nickweller ( 4108905 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @04:42PM (#49924947)
    'I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways'. Linus Torvalds [marc.info] July 2013

"Mach was the greatest intellectual fraud in the last ten years." "What about X?" "I said `intellectual'." ;login, 9/1990

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