Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org) 273
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."
He's too modest. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Or maybe he's not that brilliant, just a bloody good engineer, but he simply has no tonnes of useless management and marketeers with No Clue pulling him back and forcing him to implement great viral ideas like internet in things or database file system (yes, i am referencing windows future file system) ;)
Re:He's too modest. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
I'm not sure decision-making is really his big thing. The first reason Linux was successful is that he's a doer, there's plenty of flag-wavers that want to lead other people but who couldn't get a kernel project off the ground if their life depended on it. Linus is more like the first soldier charging, everyone else coming up from behind. Git is another fine example of this, if you know exactly what you want then just do it yourself. You don't wait around for someone else to write it for you. Obviously this is also a bit of luck with timing, but it's still not a common quality.
The second reason is that he managed to let go, so many people when they create something it's their baby and they want to control everything about it. I'm sure he was as opinionated as ever, but he wanted patches and mailing list discussions. That's why he got talked into using the GPL, it would have been easier to just sit in a corner and say I'm working on it, leave me be. And it never would have become more than a little hobby project by a CS student that'd die when he got a job or girlfriend and couldn't commit the time.
The third reason and maybe biggest is that he never started getting into business or politics, I remember him saying something like that he's building the best kernel he can make and if that'd dethrone Windows it'd be a wholly unintentional side effect. Which means that he's not taking guidance from marketing and sales on making an ABI so you can have proprietary blobs so you can increase revenue or go off evangelizing like RMS, to him the kernel is the ends not simply a means to an end.
Also I'm sure he could have become a CxO somewhere if that's what he'd wanted, but he never wanted the suit. Now many engineers don't want that, but a lot of us would do it anyway if it came with a fat paycheck. As far as I know he's not anyone's boss, the only authority he's got is final say on what goes into the Linux kernel tree. And he's always focused on having a vendor-neutral position, you don't get to hire him and tell him what to do next.
The fourth reason is that he managed to delegate, I've seen people stretch themselves thinner and thinner as the project grew and just burned themselves out. It might come naturally to a manager whose main job is delegating anyway, but it's always hard for a person who likes to know the details to accept that you can't be everywhere in every discussion reviewing every line of code. I think trust comes hard to Linus, he's erred on the side of caution and found conservative maintainers that are in it for the long run though he might have lost some good but impatient talent along the way.
He's always come across to me as a very pragmatic kind of smart, I think "street smart" would be undervaluing it but not the kind of academic 150+ IQ kind of smart. Just a fairly straight forward engineer who will dead-end discussions he won't have or arguments he won't accept in a blunt and occassionally rude way. I'm not sure his decisions are the best, but he's pretty good at cutting through the fluff and getting to the core of the issue. I wish I could do that in my job, no one hour meetings to "discuss" things. Give me the 30 second elevator pitch and I'll tell you if it's worth bothering with. Sigh, a man can dream...
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This was the money quote:
All of the great leaders I have worked with have had this capability. Most of the great developers I have worked with have been like me - always wanting one more fact, one more bit of information. I'll mull over a difficult decision for a long time trying desperately to make the perfect decision.
I worked with a CEO
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Is that you, Kay?
Re:He's too modest. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
QFT, I would actually further argue it is lucky he was right so often as he has shown a complete arrogance and unwillingness to admit when he is wrong despite what he says.
Nope. Linus is perfectly willing to admit he is wrong when proven so. Don't confuse that with backing down out of politeness to appease and avoid confrontation. He doesn't do that, and thank goodness for that.
Here's the thing that many people don't understand: Linus places *technical correctness* above all else.
That is one of the reasons Linux has been successful - he is unwilling to compromise that technical correctness for the sake of politeness, "getting along", appeasement, "business reasons" and the like. That, coupled with the fact that he's a very good engineer and project leader has kept the project on a steady path of constant and *consistent* improvement.
In the early years of the project, that was really important, IMHO, because Linux wasn't perfect and often inferior to an existing technology. But it was good enough, generally rock solid when it got things right and everyone could count on the fact that it would improve rapidly and consistently without much backsliding, if any. In other words, what Linux was good at, you could count on staying good, and what it wasn't good at *yet*, you could count on getting better in the future.
Now that I think about it, that sense of future reliability was probably a very important factor in the success of Linux, because it allowed people to lay the foundations for projects and businesses that relied on Linux, and by they time they were ready to go into production, the kernel was solid enough handle the job, usually at a fraction of the cost of existing commercial solutions. In other words, Linux turned out to be a safe bet. So Linux adoption was quite rapid (as soon as it was ready to take on a task, if not slightly before) and steadily increasing. I attribute that in no small part to Linus and the rest of the kernel developers, both because of the 'willingness to be wrong' (which kept the project moving steadily) and the complete unwillingness to let things stay wrong when it was clear they were.
Re:He's too modest. (Score:5, Interesting)
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/li... [kernel.org]
"This is being written to try to explain why Linux does not have a binary
kernel interface, nor does it have a stable kernel interface."
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https://git.kernel.org/cgit/li... [kernel.org]
"This is being written to try to explain why Linux does not have a binary
kernel interface, nor does it have a stable kernel interface."
Good God, that's tripe:
Executive Summary
-----------------
You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and
you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and
you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also
get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel
tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature
operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first
place.
How fucking arrogant does one have to be to tell me what I want?
How stupid do you have to be to realize that what you want may not be what you need?
Willingness to be illiterate (Score:2)
I see what you did there, timothy. I bet you don't.
wrong decisions (Score:2)
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending dec
Willing To Be Wrong (Score:2)
Willing To Be Wrong
It goes without saying, but it's ok to be willing to be wrong provided you have some skills and a clue of the issues you need to deal with. Otherwise, you are just a morbidly fat walrus flapping on dry land.
Ironic that Linus is willing to be wrong (Score:3)
An idea whose time had come (Score:2)
The Victor Hugo quote about nothing being more powerful than an idea whose time has come is, to me, the story of Linux.
In the '90s we had the beginnings of the internet, so people could collaborate in ways they had never done before. We had commodity PC hardware that could do interesting OS things. More.
My first Linux system was a 486/66 with Slackware 96 back in 1997. It worked fine. I use Slackware to this day on my own computers. The standard at work is CentOS. So be it.
...laura
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe this to be the case, how do you account for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD?
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Licencing. The GPL made Linux an attractive platform, especially for people working on the critically important GNU software it needed to be useful. It also set the tone for distros like Debian to emerge, and for commercial outfits like Redhat and Canonical to operate in a way that kept the open source community happy and cooperative.
A lot of Linux is written by people being paid to write it. If the licence had been BSD then much of that code might never have seen the light of day, only ever being shipped a
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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No. The GPL is more free, because Free software is really about the software's freedom.
When you get Free code, you have the Four Freedoms [wikipedia.org] - to use, study, modify, and redistribute. If you modify that code, make an improved program, and let someone else use it, the next person must also have the Four Freedoms. And they only get that if they have access to the code. When you don't release the code, the next person does not get the Four Freedoms.
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In any event, the original premise is that if BSD had been used, the code contributions could have been locked up in proprietary bundles, thus making sure that the advancements in BSD that were made by those companies are never contributed back to the project unless they wanted to. And they usually don't want to.
In Linux, if you make code changes to the kernel, they get released with source if you try and provide a solution that uses a modified Linux kernel.
Yes, BSD is free, and it will remain free. But o
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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And tomorrow, I have to format and re-install Win 7 on a customer's computer because reverting to Win 7 from Win 10 (which he didn't consent to) left it unusable. 4 hours of "startup repair", BCDEDIT, etc, etc and it still won't boot.
I will not recommend Win 10 to anyone under any circumstances. MS has really dropped the ball this time.
I can't really recommend Mint, either. Debian + {Windows look-alike shell} seems to be pretty stable so far.
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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.
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:4, Informative)
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... [time.com]
2.1 million people in America using dialup as of last May.
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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And there should be another mandatory one for all these inflated ego types: most good decisions are not about being smart but being fast and lucky. I guess that Linus was at the right place at the right time too, that he is not a GNU or BSD zealot probably helped a lot too.
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Perhaps Linus is willing to be wrong, but he's unwilling to admit when he's wrong.
Sometimes people focus on Linus' insults, but lost in all that is how often he insults himself. Even in the article, he mentions times when he was wrong.
Re:Willing to be wrong, maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Did I get that right?
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One has to differentiate between opinions and facts.
Having two contradicting opinions does not neccesary mean one is right and the other is wrong.
Despite the hurt feelings that may occur sometimes, I think it is a good thing that Torvalds has the final say on such decisions.
This guarantees a somewhat homogenous design philosophy for the kernel.
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To be fair, Microsoft's decisions are not always about the viability or capabilities of their actual software. They're mostly thinking on how to make a product that gets them a wedge into a market. For that, the software only has to be sufficient, not necessarily ground breaking. The lack of software capability is made up for by clever deals and marketing.
Of course, sometimes they miss the target of "sufficient" and the product fails. Other times, this works well for them.
And for a mediocre product, Mic
Re:Linus's real talent: (Score:4, Informative)
Linux kernel development needs people who are capable, period.
And you seem to forget who Linus is married to [wikipedia.org].
Re: Linus's real talent: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
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So politics and Hollywood do not exist?
No, they're all SJWs, including Trump.
PS: SJW means "anyone I don't like and for the record, I'm also a fuckwit"
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Capable != willing to put up with bad attitudes and being shouted at.
Indeed. This is why Sarah Sharp and Matthew Garrett left: unwillingness to put up with bullshit. Both contributed a whole bunch of really good stuff to the kernel and are thankfully still gainfully employed in the greater Linux community, just not with the kernel itself.
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I've noticed the bounce too. Sitting at -1 for both posts now, but in a while meta-moderation will probably push at least one back up to +2 or +3. Kinda screws with the debate though, since 80% of the comments are in the first hour or two.
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Nothing is more despicable than people who attempt to shoehorn less qualified people in. If someone, let it be a minority or whatever, then let them succeed on merit alone, not this crap you're peddling about how STEM needs more women. It doesn't, by the way.
So please take your atrocious and neo-fascist bullshit back to whatever SJW pit it came from, where feelings are more important than anything else. And nothing is quite so insulting to women as your bullshit that the only way they're going to do well in
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Did you know Ada ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:systemd (Score:4, Informative)
systemd is a distro decision, not a kernel decision.
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So far. The systemd devs have been trying to get their hooks into the kernel in various ways. The latest was kdbus. Linus has managed to keep their horrible code out of the kernel thus far, but it'll be interesting to see how long he can hold out.
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Far from it. By far the most widespread usage of Linux is found in cellphones and embedded applications - none of which care about an init subsystem.
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Re:systemd (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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>NetworkMangler is his too?
No it isn't and never was. Yeah, just keep on believing every lie ever told about systemd and Lennart Poettering. The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users. They are not afraid of spreading misinformation since they know how gullible people are and that people never check "facts". A simple google search would have showed you that the OP lied. Please don't ponder whether you b
systemd haters mostly Linux users with good reason (Score:2, Insightful)
The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users.
That's patently false.
I have been using Linux since the earliest versions, and have only ever casually installed *BSD just to see what was there, and I absolutely loathe systemd. All of the distros and distro-forks that have appeared at without-systemd [without-systemd.org] are maintained and used by ... wait for it ... Linux developers and Linux users. Not a single one is likely to
*BSD listed at without-systemd (Score:2)
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section [without-systemd.org] lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
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Thought I'd log in for a change to post this instead of just being yet another AC complaining about the direction mainstream distros have seem to taken.
I did Google to try to confirm whether or not Poettering had anything to do with NetworkManager. I didn't find anything to back up that assertion.
I have been a Linux user in one capacity or another for almost 20 years now; it's certainly been my kernel of choice for everything but video games for a little over 10 years. Whether or not Poettering has anythi
Re:systemd (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your alternative to NetworkManager? Manually configure every WiFi connection?
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I only have a small house so one WiFi hotspot is enough.
Re:systemd (Score:4, Informative)
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the problems described here [freedesktop.org] 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.
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For wireless connections, Network Manager seems to work fairly well.
But in my experience, it's nothing but trouble for wired connections. Why is that?
I have no idea. But I have discovered that if I want my workstations to reliably connect to the wired network, I have to rip out all vestiges of NM and configure the "old fashioned" config files. Before I started doing that I could count on at least one computer in a lab refusing to connect to the network until it was rebooted. Maybe several times. And it
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That's what I do. It's dead simple, and why would I want to connect to a WiFi AP without understanding it first? That only makes sense if you're a student with a laptop, or something like that. I'm a computer professional; wireless connections are not difficult magic for me, and I'm expected to maintain data security.
But now that Red Hat apparently wants to install Network Manager on hypervisors and servers, I don't even
Re:systemd (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Not you again, Kay?
I guess the kernel shouldn't concern itself with user-land, but (not being a programmer), tell me, what will happen if a "don't-talk-to-systemd" routine is added to the kernel?
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Since the kernel is open source, the distros - and anyone else who wants to - will remove it from their copy, so... nothing.
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Except you'd have a reasonable chance of figuring out why.
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You're correct, Linus does not maintain packages outside the kernel. That being said, he wields incredible influence, more than any one person, over the rest of the Linux community (GNU/Linux or whatever you want to refer to the whole community at large) and if he determines that something must be eliminated for the good of Linux in general, he would use that influence to see that the software would be a pariah and eventual bit death. The thing is that he must see something as a great threat to stick his
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If he did something like that, he'd probably cause a serious fork in the kernel. You can be an asshole about things, but if you start making project decisions that have nothing to do with your kernel function only because you don't like a particular application that uses it, and that application is supported by many mainline distros who provide paid kernel contributors, you're going to fuck your project.
Now if systemd caused bad behavior in the kernel, or took advantage of a feature in the kernel that he h
Re:His real secret for success (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Is that you again, Kay?
Re:His real secret for success (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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How many people were involved in the development of the first Linux kernel?
Of that person, how many are still actively developing it?
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I think the point being made here is that no separation is made between the kernel and Linux as a complete operating system. The kernel plays a role in the success of Linux, but it's not the sole reason for it's success. It's all the tools and software that make up the operating system which made it successful. Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
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Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
A car engine is far more useful than a car, and designing a building block which underpins not only desktop operating systems, but servers, 80% of the world's smartphones, and embedded devices a plenty is a far greater achievement for what Torvald's is being poo-pooed for.
Re:Linus filled a void (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
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Re:Linus filled a void (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Linus filled a void (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Re: Linus filled a void (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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It was the freedom. You could be root on your own PC.
You have to remember, virtual private servers didn't exist back then. You could rent time on someone's server but you didn't get root.
With Linux, you didn't need expensive hardware or a Unix license, and you didn't need to share. You could have a whole multiuser Unix-like OS all to yourself. For free.
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You do realize that a lot of that was not only to save memory (back then), but to save keystrokes... something that even today is pretty damned handy.
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Android went years without a standard multi-window window manager. Being forced to tab back and forth between full-screen apps isn't optimal. Android also has an aggressive OOM killer (by UNIX standards), and applications traditionally go out of their way to dump caches in response to memory pressure. Losing data because your web browser decided to "purge" the page on which which you had been entering text into a form isn't optimal. Finally, how can Intents and ContentProviders and the like be linked up in
Re: Linus filled a void (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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I don't remember SCO UnixWare being free in the early 90's. By the mid to mid/late 90's I had gotten a free evaluation or educational license from them, but that was only because Redhat was turning into something usable and x86 users were going that route.
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You pirated it. SCO was actually OK and not outrageously expensive as I recall. And it was supported which was important for business applications.
And there was minix. It wasn't open source originally. I can't recall if you had to pay for it.
And there was Microsoft's Xenix which eventually became SCO.
Re: Linus filled a void (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Linus filled a void (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Linus filled a void (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Linus filled a void (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I remember when I was using tcsh to get tab completions and some other things. Bash was around then, but it wasn't installed by default on the systems that I was using at the time. Now bash is everywhere, which is nice. I don't even have to bother with uploading a custom .cshrc or .profile any more to be productive. It's the little things that make life better, I suppose.
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I like BASH. I've heard there are better/more capable shells, but bash is 99% of the way there so I never bother with the last 1%.
I do usually load a custom .bashrc, since I like to have a colourised prompt which shows the running command in an XTERM and which machine (if any) I'm ssh'd into.
I've got a few custom autocomplete scripts too which I've collected over the years.
But yeah it's nice. I only bother if I'm settling in for a long session. The default is now good enough.
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For me is wasn't the GNU but the free as in cost part. Getting an OS that works like a $1000+ OS was a big deal.
The traditional Unix systems had (and still have some) concerns about ownership, so FreeBSD could be canceled, or forced you to pay.
Linux was one of the few Unix Like OS's that worked on PC hardware.
It's initial timing was good too. Windows 3.11 was around for way too long. What was to be windows 95 was being delayed. And a lot of people were still big on command line interfaces. But wanted 32bi
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Yeah, Win95 was nothing compared to what it was supposed to be, but it was still light years beyond Win 3.1. It pretty much made Windows the behemoth it still is today on the desktop. I'd say they made the right decision to just ship it.
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Solaris and AIX were unfriendly as hell to use without the GNU tools. GNU accomodated a much freer form set of arguments (i.e. being able to say "ls /foo/bar -l" as well as "ls -l /foo/bar"), were usually better suited for interactive use (i.e. bash command history, command line editing via beats anything I've seen in "their" camp).
I was not a GNU user by 1991 (my first experience was with the MKS toolkit for MS-DOS around 1993, until switching to Linux in 1996), but I administered my fair share of non-GNUi
Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [tumblr.com]
Re: Depression (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn man, sorry for the loss. May peace and happiness find its way to you.
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I thought that rule only applied to musicians?
Or maybe 27 is when realize they won't be a famous musician and get depressed that they'll have to be office drones forever and ever...
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