Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk) 361
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone honest.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
That instantly disqualifies him for management or political office.
We may need a new mod rating for statements like this: ie, sad but true.
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No. Good. Linus is competent. It's a shame when competent people get wasted in management. If more of them were loudmouths the world would be a better place. Perhaps a good enough place that we'd view managers as low level employees whose job is to take care of the mundane crap so the competent people weren't bothered by it.
Yes, I am also disqualified from management or public office.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame when competent people get wasted in management.
I see these type of comments a lot, and I really don't get it. You think it would be better to have an incompetent person in management? You know what? Management is hard! I've been a manager for several years now, having stepped up from system administration when my predecessor left. Dealing with people is much harder than dealing with technology. You can't just google how to fix someone when they've got a problem. There's no reset button on a person. You have to figure it out, and work at it. Rarely do I leave the office and stop thinking about the problems I have to deal with the next day. Especially so when it's a sensitive or emotional issue.
I've had my share of poor managers, and they're not easy to deal with. I regard myself as pretty competent, and I strive to be a good manager, but like you, I'm a person and I sometimes make mistakes. Dealing with the repercussions of that isn't always easy. I've had to deal with accidents, serious illness, family bereavement, depression, infighting, poor performance, politics (oh God, the politics!) and a whole host of other things I wouldn't or couldn't list here. Dealing with a broken server or some dodgy code is a doddle in comparison.
Often it's a case of just taking the responsibility to make a decision. Even if the employee has come to the correct solution, they want someone else to carry it forwards. They can then go away, confident that if it all goes tits up, I'll be there to pick up the pieces and protect them from the shit heading their way.
I love the job, I really do. I feel it's more of a challenge than I ever had as a sysadmin. I'm not making light of the work that the technical guys do in any way. We're all links in the chain, and without good management, it does fall apart. I've seen it more times than I care to remember.
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Actually, the correct headline would be "Tech is bullshit." The scramble to over-hype and monetize and get rich quick has ruined it.
One good example is the internet. Overall, it has been a net loss for humanity. Ignoring the fact that social media is turning everyone into anti-social bubble-heads living in their little "safe zones", just look at the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people. The total of dead and displaced is in the millions, and threa
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In what alternate reality does one think that the internet wouldn't have been developed without one person? Or that computers and thus networking of those computers, and thus communication via those computers isn't just an inevitable part of the path of science and technology? We are all dumber for having read your post.
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Ignoring the bad pun, claiming that enabling technologies are a "mass loss" is purely absurd.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is not to blame for humanity's failings. Neither can we realistically expect it to solve them. I'll still take, on balance, the world's information at our fingertips and global communication and commerce over whatever alternative you think would be better.
the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people
Only by incredibly naive, overly-optimistic pundits. For those of us living in reality, it turned out pretty much as expected.
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Much to the point of this thread, the day is not long in coming where a series of small, hotly debated innovations in machine learning will culminate in a robust classifier able to ferret out a dozen egregious offenses against working brain cells in that toxic screed of hot-button click-bait you just posted.
The wise among us will use this forthcoming capability to accept all well-formed signals, the fools will filter bubble to black. The later group being larger than the former group, while the former grou
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If you ask Internet "who invented internet?", you get the following answer:
Internet Inventors
- Robert E. Kahn
- Vint Cerf
Maybe it's Skynet protecting itself against a potential reverse-Terminator-style scenario, or your target is the wrong one.
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He may be honest, but he's also wrong. Yes, of course "real work" needs to be done to turn ideas into reality, but those ideas are at least as important as the work themselves. "Real work" in service of bad ideas is entirely wasted, and there are plenty of Silicon Valley companies turning out useless apps and software products that won't go anywhere that talented people have spent a lot of time making.
Linus is wrong, and "innovation," however you want to define it, is damned important.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Linus' point is there's too much attention spent on hype (the "innovation"), and too little spent on actually getting something built. Having built something himself, and maintained it longer than the lifespans of countless tech companies, he's in an excellent position to say what he's saying. The weak link in the chain is where you start raising money with your idea and your salesmanship, and it becomes time to start hiring engineers, leasing office and factory space, and building prototypes that have a shot at becoming real products. All that costs money, a lot of it, and some "entrepreneurs" and their benefactors simply can't handle seeing all that money they raised just slip away. Easier to keep it, brag about how much you've raised, keep shaking hands with billionaires, and keep on partying on the fund-raising circuit, kicking the whole build-it thing down the road for as long as you can (it's better than bankruptcy in the event your product fails). Human-nature can creep in and fuck-up any good idea with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door. Wasn't it Jobs who said "Real artists ship"? That's what Linus was talking about.
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Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money [and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door.]
I don't think it is their wierdness that made them succesful It is that they were BORN rich. They went from being very rich to being super rich. Being born rich is the key qualifier for success.
You dropped "get a product out the door" as if you believed being rich was enough. There's enough rich failures to show the opposite.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
No, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with a dozen ideas every hour, from the mundane to fantasy.
Execution is key. An idea is just that, abstract. It doesn't mean anything, and millions of individuals will have that same idea. Most of the time, we don't work on the idea - either we realize it's fantasy and thus not worth looking into, or it's pointless, or the ROI is bad. But in the end, the idea doesn't matter. It's the execution of taking that idea and turning it into reality that's important.
And yes, some ideas are totally bad. But behind every useless app was an idea that seemed good, and heck, enough people believed in it to actually bring it to fruition. Now, it could be an incredibly bad idea to begin with, but someone had the resources and means to get it done. Or it could be a good idea executed too early before the market was ready for it (look at streaming music - back a decade and a half, "renting music" was considered a ludicrous idea, now it's a billion dollar industry). Or suffer from poor marketing.
And finally, what seems like a bad idea now might've seemed like a good one at the time.
You really don't know the value of an idea until you try it out.
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No, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with a dozen ideas every hour, from the mundane to fantasy.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, but great ideas are rare.
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"Real work" in service of bad ideas is entirely wasted[...]
Not if it pays the mortgage and feeds my kids.
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Funny, I think you hit the nail on the head, except used it to support entirely the wrong conclusion. All those useless app companies tout their "innovation." They have some mediocre idea and flog it to death.
The real innovators are the ones who have an idea then go and execute it really, really well. Linus didn't say innovation was worthless, he said it was a minor part of the whole; just the starting point.
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Torvalds' personality is more of an incrementalist than a visionary. He wants to master a field before he publishes his work, and it's easier (note: *not* easy) to master to something if there is a good-size accumulation of outstanding work from predecessors.
That's not a criticism because one could say the same of many first-rate engineers and scientists.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
As one of the commentards on The Register highlighted, Git deviated and can easily be considered innovative.
So while much of his work has been taking 'good' and improving it to 'great' he's also capable of the sideways shift into a different future.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
The Core Linux crap he leads doesn't innovate per se. It doesn't have to. It needs to be stable, consistent and performant. The work they do is important, but it's built on the shoulders of giants like Dennis Ritchie. What's innovative in Linux is the social and collaborative construct. But it's not like those are new ideas.
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I just wish people wouldn't mix up invention and innovation so easily together. Innovation is after all an invention turned into economic activity.
Perspiration (Score:3)
Re:Perspiration (Score:5, Informative)
"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/ [quoteinvestigator.com]
Re:Perspiration (Score:5, Insightful)
re: Edison (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.
Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.
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And his 1% inspiration was from standing on the shoulders of Nikola Tesla...
Re:Perspiration (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Perspiring while developing code that is freely donated to anyone, and which has found its way into gadgets and devices all around us.
or
2. Perspiring while doing an insane monkey dance screaming developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS.
You decide.
Quote (Score:2, Insightful)
-Thomas A. Edison (Privileged White Dude & Climate Denier...) l
which is why everyone can't be a programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
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I disagree. You can always innovate to make yourself (typically your code) more productive and efficient. For a lot of brute force tasks you've not really succeeded until you've made yourself redundant. Theoretically the savings this generates gets recognized and you get promoted/assigned more innovative tasks.
Innovation is sooo last year.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Myopia... (Score:3, Interesting)
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
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I think it depends on where you think the innovation ends and the perspiration begins. If Musk says he wants to build a rocket that can land again that's not very innovative. If SpaceX actually builds a rocket that can land again it's very innovative. Between the former and the latter is the 99% perspiration Linux talks about. Granted, occasionally it's the very concept that's so new and popular it'll sell your idea even if you stumble on the implementation. But most of those I'd call marketing gimmicks, ca
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Whoops, actually mean to preview not submit. But the other part I wanted to say is that a lot of the talking heads aren't actually very innovative and they act like all the hard work was in the idea. Like if they were doing Google's self-driving car project they'd spent tons of time on an overarching architecture concept that'd essentially say sensors -> analysis -> decision -> execution -> feedback and spend six months and 100 pages to say it. Well duuuuuuuuuh. And it'd be full of vaguely unimp
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Re:Myopia... (Score:5, Funny)
Ideas are two for a quarter. REALIZED ideas might have merit.
F*cking inflation. Back in my day they were a dime a dozen :-)
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Maybe because IT is a broad encompassing field that includes engineering operating systems and running an IT department.
Google? IT
VCE appliances? IT
Splunk? IT
High frequency trading? IT
It's all just IT. Deal with it.
The big difference... (Score:2)
It's kind of a - umm, no shit - statement, (Score:2)
All innovation is simply a series of very small steps. All "discoveries" or "inventions" are at their root, fairly minor enhancements to existing knowledge or craft.
Sure, sometimes those minor enhancements were not at all obvious to anyone except the exceptional person (or team) who made them, but, once the enhancement is announced, it's completely obvious, to anyone willing to analyse it, how it rests on all the past development.
I challenge anyone to f
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Reality shows us, 99.999999% of the value is in the implementation of the idea, the idea is nearly worthless.
Obvious solutions are only obvious after they have been solved. The fact that I can explain how an incandescent lightbulb works, a semiconductor, nuclear fusion and fission, does not put me on the level of the giants (and teams of giants) who made those discoveries. Those discoveries were made from deliberate acts of innovation that Linus declares to be bullshit and you declare to be worthless. Who gives a shit about incrementalism. Of course all discovery is built on the foundations of prior discovery,
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I have to agree (Score:2)
If we look at what's usually called "innovation", it's often really about market acceptance. The first iPhone didn't involve any technology that was unique or special by itself; it was just a combo of features and decent implementation that caught on with the public: knowing what to keep, what to cut, and how to package it all together.
There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around, such as my pet, dynamic relational [slashdot.org], but until somebody implements a version that actually catches on with the industry,
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The first iPhone
Do subsequent iPhones? Serious question, I am not that familiar with them, but I am with the hardware that goes into them and most, if not all, hardware that I've seen is some variation on a schematic provided by the supplier.
This applies beyond IT (Score:2)
I wandered into some echo-box on Twitter where a bunch of old farts were being roused into a rabble by some liberal journalist talking about how we need basic / universal income now because soon the robots will take away our jobs and life will be pristine, prosperous, and without war.
I called the journalist out on talking a lot of shit, in response to which he just talked more shit. To quote: "the machines will pay us". I had to point out a few things:
1. Technology is a tool, not a participant.
2. If your bi
But...but...look what I invented!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's round! It rolls! You could use it to transport things! I think I'll call it...the wheel.
Example: I just saw a presentation involving a new ORM framework today - same old idea, same crappy ORM efficiency [blogspot.ch], why am I supposed to be impressed? How many ORM frameworks do we need? [wikipedia.org] They all do the same damned thing, and all of them do it badly. By the time you have the latest and greatest innovative framework working in your project (having had to mangle to your architecture to compensate for the horrible inef
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What else is new? (Score:2)
The cult of innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Innovation, invention and discovery are certainly important and can allow us to more easily or efficiently address needs, but when we are talking about "innovation" or innovative people most of the time what we are really talking about is creative problem solving using already existing methods, knowledge and technology.
It is easy to look at IT and see how real innovations have contributed to a transformation of many aspects of society over the last half century and then fall into the cult of innovation as a sort of belief in perpetual innovation as a means for the betterment of society. But both a longer view and more critical view of our day to day society should confirm the importance of understanding that you already have many of the technological tools and methods needed to address today's needs. And a good application of those already known technological tools and methods should be the priority of problem solving rather than innovation merely for the sake of innovation.
Surely there is always a need for innovation, especially in medicine where virus are constantly evolving to maximize their contagion and our existing tools need to be adapted to new challenges. But in other technology areas the problem domain does not change as remarkably over time. And already developed technology is well suited for most day to day challenges.
Sure you can probably cite a thousand different examples where today's technology is inadequate to a problem or need, but I think the point is that it is no less noble or worthy to address the tens of thousands of those other problems and human needs that can be worked on without the need for any fundamental innovation.
Bullshit infects Innovation. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not innovation itself, but more what we're defining as innovation.
When a person can act like a complete fucking idiot on YouTube and amass a billion look-at-this-dumbass clicks resulting in a six-figure salary, I'd say that says a lot about what is "innovative" today. Don't even get me started on reality TV.
The scary part is watching Wall Street get high as a kite off the innovation fumes as they drool over shit like Snapchat, who loses hundreds of millions every year and arrogantly brags how they may never become profitable, defying all common sense with a multi-billion dollar IPO valuation.
Not that we have any.bomb evidence of what happens when bullshit infects innovation...
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99% theft, 1% kernel (Score:2, Insightful)
>> "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details."
>> Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
this is because Linux took 99% of its innovation from others and then had the 1% kernel.
I love this man. (Score:2)
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Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
And we cant just say "fuck it and fuck your bullshit, I'm heads down working"
Actually, you can. In some places just like that. In others possibly "I'm busy, when do you need this by". If you are in a place where you are working hard, and which values your contribution, the message survives the diction. In other places, which talk a lot about technology but really just need glorified MBAs who know how computers work, you probably can't get away with this. Quit.
I think his message is exactly right, and so many companies get lost in the bullshit they are unable to get the job done. Often of course because they have moved into the Wall St. phase of "let the losers of the pyramid game get their money back, if possible".
Any asshole can have an idea, most of technology (or most anything else for that matter) is the hard work. This is also what makes us so hostile towards patents that don't have products behind them.
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This is also why so many "tech" companies want to hire young kids straight out of school - they are too naive to see through the marketing nonsense, so they buy into it.
As far as I am concerned, the whole dot-com insanity was the worst thing to happen for tech ... ever. It gave rise to the hype-over-fact culture that we are now saddled with, and the kids who grew up through it don't know enough history to see through the smoke screen. So now we have people more concerned with buzz words than substance, mo
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Most of us who got out of school during dot-com, figured it out, quickly, in 2001.
What survived however is the dot-com corporate culture of hype over substance, there were still a lot of winners there for the suite types, and the lesson they learned was somethings you can make more with a flop than with a hit. (Queue the theme song to The Producer)
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Any asshole can have an idea, most of technology (or most anything else for that matter) is the hard work.
Hard work? Isn't there an app for that?
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Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble (Score:5, Interesting)
No doubt, the earlier we expose kids to real programming (as opposed to the drag-and-drop programming equivalent of the old Radio Shack "hundred-in-one electronics projects" kits that Code.org keeps touting as some sort of mythical progress), the higher quality programmers we'll eventually turn out; but that doesn't mean you'll see a substantial increase in the number of people who can, and can stand to, code.
Early exposure might mean a few more people realize they have what it takes to code, but programming is hard, despite all the rose-scented farts Google, Microsoft et al keep encouraging us to sniff. The vast majority or people have neither the aptitude nor the patience to ever master the relevant skills.
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Probably more like "intolerant of bullshit and buzzwords"
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.
I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Yet he proved that great execution of an existing idea is much more valuable and has a much greater impact (worldwide, long lasting impact) than a beautiful, innovative design.
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I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Old does not imply outdated.
We still drive cars with steering wheels, because it's a bloody good design.
What many young whippersnappers tend to forget is that when something has survived for decades, there are likely good reasons for it. Unless you understand those reasons, resist the temptation to change things, and instead launch an alternative and let competing products fight based on merit and not edicts.
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Examples of this in the car world is a tiller for steering (replaced by wheel) and electric push button transmission. Or candlestick phones.
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Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.
See also: git
Re: Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Beautiful designs are generally bad. They get taken to the extreme; and you get shit like xml.
XML was pretty awesome ... as a markup language for books and other natural language documents. It was a wonderful tamed version of SGML. Then some crazy people started using it blindly as a object serialization language.
The odd thing is, you can write terse XML for object serialization (just slightly more verbose than CSV!) but no one did. Instead you got the most verbose approach to serialization imaginable.
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XML was conceived and pitched from the getgo as a Swiss Army knife-type tool that could be a near-universal application-level network protocol and file format substrate. They were wrong.
Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact it's good for natural language mark-up. IIRC, all the examples in the standard are of that sort of thing, e.g. using custom-defined &entities; for copyright date. And I recall an interview with one of the creators, who was taken aback at the prevalence of XML for object serialization.
So, "pitched", sure lots of people were pitching XML for all sorts of things. But "conceived"? I'm not sure of that. We'd need to ask Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, and C. M. Sperberg-
Re: Innovation (Score:2)
Are there unique innovations anyway, except for the delight of lawyers? Everything is built on something. The need to state uniqueness and innovation is kind of selfish.
Progress is about sharing, so that the flowers can bloom. Everything else is more or less about constraining innovation.
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Another, less nasty, is that Linus merely forked/reimplemented something that was already there. From scratch, so not stolen, but not really a new idea. Which has some merit; as I recall Linus said the wrote the original kernel as a fun project. Since then, there's been a whole lot of "have an idea, put in a lot of work to make it work".
However, to the original AC's comment I will point out git.
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There is plenty of innovation in Linux. There is also 99 times more perspiration than innovation.
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I will answer it this way. What file system are you using? How many other file systems have you used in the past 20 years on Linux? That is one small bit of the Operating System known as Linux, which has nothing to do with what Unix was doing 35 years ago.
Because Unix/Linux has been highly modularized, the innovation you fail to see is happening in all sorts of places. Usually followed by 99% perspiration in getting implementation working. And it appears and small increments in a huge ecosystem.
Heck, I woul
Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger (Score:5, Interesting)
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born. It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
The work is more important than the idea (Score:5, Insightful)
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.
Re:The work is more important than the idea (Score:4, Informative)
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
Available to you. Mainframes have made extensive use of both since the early 80s, at least. The hard work was done, it was just done in an environment that relatively few people interacted with directly.
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They were at least doing simulation work on parallelism back in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s, as you say, mainframes were using these techniques extensively. IBM pioneered virtualization in the 1970s largely because they needed to support legacy applications on newer hardware.
It seems strange to me that someone would claim that thirty years worth of intensive CS research doesn't count because they didn't get it on their PC until the last ten years.
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I don't think Martian was disagreeing with Linus. All the "innovation" happened in the 50s-70s. It's mostly been perspiration since then.
That's not 100% true of course. The notion of Ajax was legitimately new. Normal HTML GET and POST style web pages were almost identical to the way mainframe terminal systems had worked for decades before, but the terminal asynchronously communicating with the host? Actual innovation that enabled a lot of good (and bad) stuff.
But it's hard to find examples like that.
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There has not been nothing new in operating systems since 1955.
That was twenty years ago.I don't know what has changed since then, but I haven't seen any
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Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the thing. Technical comparisons aside, Linux did something that none of the Unixes could do.
Linux was open source. That caused a huge development kick start which would be the envy of the private fiefdoms of proprietary closed Unix.
Linux then became cross platform. That causes Linux to run anywhere that the C compiler could run. Again, the envy of closed platforms.
Those two things combined make Linux suddenly attractive to anyone needing to build a software system on a non-PC platform. Or even on a PC platform where OS licensing is an issue. Applications like: smart phones. GPS navigators. TV set top DVRs. Streaming internet TV boxes. Digital cameras. Smart TVs. In car entertainment systems. Digital signage and billboard display applications. Chromecast type sticks. Amazon Echo type devices. And the list just goes on and on and on.
So, is Linux innovative? I believe so. And where all those proprietary Unixes? In the proprietary tarpit. Even Microsoft is realizing that it can't avoid operating with open source and Linux. BTW, Wine now runs on [woafre.tk] Windows Subsystem for Linux [wikipedia.org].
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You must be confusing it with NetBSD.
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Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger (Score:5, Insightful)
Now to the point.
I am ignoring Unix until a time when it was practical for most people to actually run it. The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC. By the mid to late 90's some people were noticing that you could run Linux on a souped up PC for ten grand and replace a thirty grand Unix box.
If Linux hadn't come along, Unix would be something in obscurity.
Here we are today where you can get Linux on a Raspberry Pi for $35 with 1 GB of ram, gigabytes of SD card storage, 4 core processor, etc. And proprietary unix is relatively obscure.
That makes Linux sure seem innovative to me. It obviously did something VERY right. So much that now Microsoft can no longer ignore it.
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I do not recognize some of the companies in your post. What are those things called TRS-80, Commodore Pet and Microsoft?
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The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC.
I was running 386BSD on x86 PCs in 1992-93. While all UNIX wasn't proprietary at that point, this was a time of great changes in that realm. ATT UNIX was in the process of getting re-written as BSD. There was also much legal wrangling going on around the re-write, slowing down the process. According to Linus [gondwanaland.com], "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
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. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC.
Microsoft had a version of Unix (Xenix) in the 80s that could run on x86 boxes.
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Minix was a better design. .
I don't know whether to moderate this -1 flamebait or +1 funny. Let's just go with "+0, Ok?"
Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger (Score:4, Funny)
How about +1i
Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure, try https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/... [mozilla.org]
If that image of Torvalds didn't render in your version of Firefox then you may have local issues.
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Yes, an uprising for the proletariat!
Software development isn't the "hardest stuff". Trying to run a company, pay your employees, keep the customers happy, keep the lights on.. all of that doesn't just happen on its own. If it was so easy, you'd be running your own company rather than whining about it.
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Well, everybody can run a company; just start one up and off you go.
What, you want the high salary that goes with being a CEO? Best build that company up fast then.
Me, I work as hard as a blue-chip CEO but with a very different and somewhat less lucrative skillset. I don't work as hard as a small company owner and that's a very deliberate choice.
Being a manager is laborious too. I mean, shit, you have to talk to people. Yuck.
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