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In-Depth Upside Interview With Linus Torvalds 96

Posted by Roblimo from the he's-starting-to-like-sushi dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "I've heard that Linus will grace the cover of the next Upside. Their site posted the interview today. It's one of those huge, future-speak filled, all-encompassing pieces. Pretty good stuff." This may be the *longest* Linus interview ever posted online. But there's enough new information in it (besides the sushi comment; I didn't make that up) that it's probably worth reading.
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In-Depth Upside Interview With Linus Torvalds More

In-Depth Upside Interview With Linus Torvalds

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  • Money, Revolutions, and Microsoft (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is odd how money is many times a factor, even if the factor is whether or not money is a factor. As an American I detest that the American dream is about money. To me, the American Dream is rising up and lifting yourself to new heights. It is possible it means money, but I beleive their are other ways as well.

    One thing I have noted often enough is that to many people who are aware of technology, revolutions are a good thing. I completely disagree. Revolution means drastic change. Change is good. Drastic is not. In any revolution in history, much was destroyed to bring about the revolution. The same implies with computers. If a new technology is revolutionary, it must change drasticly. That means incompatability and everything needs to be rebuilt. This is bad. And as often the new Amiga people say "revolutionary" I say it will fail because of it. Unless it isn't a real revolution.

    And Microsoft. To far too many people, Microsoft means money. They used to mean success but they don't seem as successful anymore. So now they mean money, and to too many people, money means greed. After you see through many wicked associations like this, you begin to see it is largely unwarranted. Microsoft offers conveniance and their motivation is money. Their monopoly on operating systems is bad, but again their motivations are money. And when a company is as big as Microsoft, it can't help tramping some people. So don't ask for the end of Microsoft. Ask to make them smaller. They have some nice technologies and too many people fail to recognize this.


    After you look at yourself enough, you find out where your prejudices lay. The rules are the same as anywhere else: give it the benefit of the doubt, look at it in the eyes of another, and what would you did if you were them. And then life doesn't seem as evil anymore.


    (I guess you might be wondering what this has to do with the interview. Well, all three of my topics were mentioned in the interview. And I can imagine many people commenting in this thread without thinking objectably. It is difficult, especially on slashdot, I know.)

    Kevin Holmes
    "extrasolar"
    klh@sedona.net

  • Re:Money, Revolutions, and Microsoft (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Obviously "revolutionary" it's just a bastardized contraction of "really evolutionary". Probably just looks funny in print when you spell it "r'evolutionary". >;)
  • Having been both an interviewer and an interviewee in the past --

    Often, answers to questions will wander off into all sorts of tangents before coming back to the point. Reading a wandering comment is no fun. Thus the need to edit a comment into something short and concise that grabs the reader's attention while being faithful to the general point.

    -E

  • Interesting. Every time I use Word97 under Windows 98, I end up getting a "This program has committed an illegal operation" and end up having to reboot.

    I've been an Applix Office user since 1996 (when it was first introduced), and have never had it crash.

    Netscape crashes, but it crashes just as hard under Windows. That's why I erased it off my Win98 machine at home, and is why I'll erase it off my Linux/FreeBSD machine at home as soon as KDE 2.0 introduces Java and Javascript into the KDE browser (it's coming!). The KDE browser already kicks rear. It's not going to take much before I can kiss Netscape goodbye!

    -E
  • I [always] enjoy seeing [well written] articles on technologies and [operating systems] that I [use]. Linus is certainly [inspirational] in that he can [work full time] and [maintain Linux]. I [hope that] he [will continue to devote] himself [to Linux]. Incidentally my new [e-business] [Paraphrase.com] is applying for [patents] on the [extensive] use of [[]] in [electronic documents].
  • Especially that it would have been pretty cheap to have an unprocessed version on the internet... had the person interviewing Linus thought about it ;-)

    ---

  • I think they were talking about kernel 0.0.1, or whatever the first release was.
  • Yeah, I particularly wonder what Linux said that was paraphrased as "[nontechnical computer users]"...

    Or perhaps we should play it like Madlibs, figuring out what would be the funniest words to put inside the brackets.
  • "And while a young Gates labeled fellow programmers "thieves" for copying his mediocre code, the generous Torvalds freely shared his epiphany with the world. Which man and movement wins may decide technology's future."

    Kinda sums up the whole sheebang.

  • First of all, Linus didn't write all of the half a million lines that they say are in the kernel (and it's surely much more than a million by now at the rate drivers are added? I haven't done a count in a while) Secondly, comparing only the number of lines in the Linux kernel to all of Windows is stupid. To make a more meaningful comparison, you have to count glibc2 and all the other libraries, as well the X server, and probably a few of the important daemons! It's not like Windows NT is millions of lines lines of just kernel code!!!

    That Ted Lewis cheesehead made the same mistake in that ``Open Source Acid Test'' embarassement, when he claimed that Linux's million lines of code do not approach the more than ten million in a real UNIX, and that Linux will have to get that big before it can compete.
  • There was some good information about this in the critique [interaccess.com] that Andy Bakun wrote in response to The Open Source Acid Test article. He measured 2.2.0pl8 at 1,598,764 lines. A far cry from the half million that this article claims.
  • Hey, maybe Linus is just trying to not appear as a snob. I'm not saying that he would say that he likes Hollywood entertainment better just because he doesn't want to offend, but it could be that the interviewer is reading too much into whatever he might have said. I'm thinking that Linus could have said that he likes some Hollywood movies, and the interviewer spun that into ``prefers Hollywood movies to highbrow European art films''. In reality, the man probably enjoys a bit of both and probably takes each film on its own merit rather than judging it by where it came from.

    I mean what's he going to say? That Hollywood movies are shallow, mindless trash compared to European art movies? Coming from a recent comer from the Old World it would be seen as blatant euro-snobbery, even though everyone knows that it's true. :)
  • Someone moderate that comment up...

    Yes, I'm also saddened by how often money is seen as all-important in the U.S.A. As an American who grew up in Europe (France, specifically) and is now going to college in the U.S., I have seen American culture from both the inside and the outside. And IMNSHO, Americans in general put way too much value on money. People pursue higher-paying jobs at the expense of their health, their families, their happiness. Good, but less popular, TV shows get cut in favor of low-quality (but popular) Yet-Another-Sitcom shows, because those get higher ratings and thus more advertising revenue. And so it goes...

    I was talking to somebody once who mentioned, "You can make a lot of money in the field of computer science, can't you?" I answered, "Yeah, you can... If money's what you care about." He gave me a funny look. Sigh... Sometimes I'd like to stand in the middle of downtown with a megaphone during rush hour and yell at all the people going to work, "Hey! Money isn't everything, you know!" Do you think they'd lock me in the insane asylum? If you don't want money or fame in today's American culture, you're a nobody. Well, my answer to that comes from Emily Dickinson (this is from memory, so I may get punctuation or capitalization wrong...):

    I'm nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody too?
    Then that makes two of us -- don't tell!
    They'd banish us, you know.

    How dreary to be Somebody!
    How public, like the frog,
    To tell your name the livelong day
    To an admiring bog!
    -----

  • Damn straight. Sums up the whole excercise for me. Look at Gates's face when he talks. If he was any more full of doo-doo he'd explode!
    Hell, he has hand-jive consultants!
    (very inside unless you know politics)
    Not a good sign. He plans to do that.
    It WILL happen. Bill wants power. Badly.
    Maybe we can run him against steve forbes for global benevolent dictator.
    You scared yet?

  • Upside: But you're not paid to do that. Most people would find it bizarre that you could have such a huge unpaid job ...
    Torvalds: Even the people who can't imagine doing something just for the love of doing something--they're sad people,

    Damm, that almost brought a tear to my eye!
  • It was something like:

    "Design of a portable Operating System."

    Ie: linux.

    It was on a page of the title list of graduate papers at the Uni of ... (helsinki??) for the year Linus did his - maybe it's still there.

    I Wonder what grade he got, be interesting to know.
  • Whenever I have to interview someone, the conversation is rarely as clear as one would like to see on a printed page.

    Sentences get broken up with mumbles, hand gestures or references to multiple 'it's 'them's and 'thingumajig's which make perfect sense to both parties but would be meaningless out of context.

    Therefore, it is often necessary to alter the quotes either by the insertion of the correct pronouns, etc. or by the use of square-bracketed references.

    I doubt if the interviewer changed the sense of anything Linus had to say - if he did then would be trivial for Linus to spot it & issue a correcting statement given that the interview is online.

  • 5%, he said in one interview. But he is source coordinator and decides how the infrastructure. That is more important than LOC.

  • Nah, let's make it a Ludlum,
    "The Penguin Dominance"
    or a Dale Brown,
    "Flight of the Penguin"

  • Hmm...methinks even though he be Finnish, he may be a disciple of those two most excellent brethren, Bill & Ted. They all have famous quotes:

    Jesus O' Nazereth: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto your" [Um, but what if I'm really into S&M??]

    Bill S. Preston, Esq: "Be Excellent To Each Other."


  • I believe his thesis was actually the 1.0 kernel.

    I'd give him an "A" :-)

    (anyone know for sure?)
  • I think it was a joke, silly.
  • Wow, its good to see Linus being displayed in such a way that shows how much more a better person he is than Gates.
  • I thought it was a good interview (more actual content than any other I've seen, I think), but I was a little perturbed at all the [editorial] modifications. Not to say that they didn't do a good job, but seeing [all of] those insertions/changes just makes me wonder what he *really* said. ;-)

    Not that I think there is any deception, just that I want to KNOW what slang Linus used.

    All in all, kudos to Upside, though.
    Ethan
  • I have always felt (from his posts to linux-kernel, etc) that he spoke English very well. Better than most of the people here in the midwestern US, as a matter of fact. ;-) I wondered about their motivation myself.
  • I agree... However, how hard is it to post an unmodified interview along with the obviously *majorly* modified interview. I mean, after all, we're talking a web page here. They can cut & paste 90% of it. (unless they cut a LOT of material!)
    Ethan
  • That's bullshit. Linux is not much better than NT.
    It is better the way every Unix is better than NT.
    That's a server side.

    But if talk about workstation ( or should I say desktop) side then things are radicaly different.

    Come on, have you ever used desktop apps on Linux ?
    They crash, crash hard , much more often than anything on Windows.
  • "his drive to break monopoly software pricing is reflected in his other tastes. For example, ... he prefers Hollywood entertainment to highbrow European art films."

    Hollywood would have to be THE Monopoly of the film industry!! Hollywood is driven by capitalism and a love of money, rather than any love of story telling or making films. In comparison European films run on budgets far lower, because they realise that millions of dollars of special FX + Overpaid American actors don't necessarily make a good film.

    Cough. I think we can see a little bias in this author here.
  • [tongue in cheek]Maybe when she sees the article she'll contact the author and kick his ass. [/tongue in cheek]
  • When people are, you know, talking to an interviewer, a journalist, not, ummm, writing something where they can, er, edit, change what they wrote, make it compact, er, compact and clear, ummm, they often use a lot of words, more words than they really, uh, need to make their point, you know what I mean? So the journalist, you know, condenses, paraphrases.

    (Or maybe the interviewer had a lousy tape recorder, and when he went back to his office to transcribe the tape, he discovered that many of the words were inaudible.)

  • It is not at all surprising that Jonathan Littman is behind such a clueful article. He seems to be a really first rate journalist/author.
  • I personally liked the picture on the first page.
    --
  • They're next in line to offer an eIPO! Didn't you all get the letter?

  • author (Score:1)

    by lisa ( 19611 )
    Did you notice who the author was? Jonathan Littman-author of The Watchman and The Fugitive Game .

    That's pretty cool.

    I can see his next book-The Penguin Hour:The story behind the OS (now a made for tv movie!)

    -Lisa

  • I hate [interviews] where the [subject's words] are getting [paraphrased] left and right by the [interviewer].
  • My favorite bit...

    If Microsoft can change and compete on quality, I've won.

  • Does anyone happen to know what Linus wrote his Master's Degree thesis on? (Or would he be the guy to email about that?)

    I'm curious because he's the closest thing to a hero that computer science students have. Most of the other big names in the computer industry are either managers, advocates, crackers, or profs -- there's no reason why any of those shoes must be filled by a talented programmer. Linus is a nice guy, a good (if not exceptional) programmer, and still young enough to be trusted. :) He's a far better role model than any sports star, why do journalists never think of him as such?

  • I'm not saying he's a rolemodel because of Linux's technical aspects, but of how he's changing the way people use computers. Some obscure researcher with papers that have titles that can't be understood by 1st-years is not a good rolemodel.

    To recap, Linus is a good rolemodel because:

    • Linux is an accessible, useful, and philosophically interesting achievement.
    • Linus has chosen the public good over money.
    • Linus is in the limelight enough that aspiring programmers don't have to rely on technical journals to hear about him.
    The only other person I can think of that comes close to fulfilling those three criteria is Tim Berners-Lee.
  • ...and complane about learning something "useless" like regular languages and finite automata


    You ought to tell such a person to try to grep for palindromes in text. Hehe...
  • Huh!?!?!?!?!? There are LOTS of incredible role models for aspiring computer scientists. Linux is cool, but it's definitely NOT groundbreaking in any technical sense. It's mostly a rehash of older *nix systems. In fact, the only really novel thing about Linux is it's development model (open source) which has more to do with software engineering, management, and perhaps social theory than with computer science.

    If you want to find some REAL computer science role models, I suggest you start by looking in the back of your text books for widely and recently (since 1960 or so) referenced computer scientists/mathematicians. Then track down that authors web page at whatever university s/he is at and take a gander at their "Family Tree" (of doctoral students). And while you're at it, download a few of their papers (if available) or at least find a few of their tech-reports in your library. If you want to see some impressive work, this the the only way to go. You may be able to find some papers written by people in industry, but so much of it tends to be proprietary. Fortunately, this seems to be changing (IBM research and Bell Labs/Lucent publish a lot of their material online also).



    -NooM

  • I thought it was a good interview (more actual content than any other I've seen, I think), but I was a little perturbed at all the [editorial] modifications.

    No kidding. Particularly when a lot of the modifications appear to have been from an acceptable English phrasing to a different, more verbose English phrasing... I mean, it's fine if the editing serves to explain some unfamiliar jargon, or gloss-replace a one-off slang term, but when the editing is just nitpicking his grammar? When it's perfectly good to start with?

    (from a different post)
    When people are, you know, talking to an interviewer, a journalist, not, ummm, writing something where they can, er, edit, change what they wrote, make it compact, er, compact and clear, ummm, they often use a lot of words, more words than they really, uh, need to make their point, you know what I mean?

    I'd agree with you, except that it's standard practice to abridge all that without even marking its loss. Especially things like "um" and "er", but even (perhaps to a lesser extent) "you know", "like", &c.

  • Torvalds seems a populist at heart, and his drive to break monopoly software pricing is reflected in his other tastes. For example, he won't buy a book in hardback: He believes they cost too much because they generally don't sell widely. Similarly, he prefers Hollywood entertainment to highbrow European art films.

    how does bying cheap books and watching mainstream hollywood movies help break monopolies?
    exactly the opposite is true:
    cheap books and hollywood make it hard to create and sell high-quality products that only have a small audience. why do you think microsoft gives away IE? and once you pushed everybody else out of business then you can raise prices and enjoy your monopoly
    note: i do not want to criticize linus' choice of books and movies, but the interpretation of it.

  • You know, there are already a couple of comments like this one.

    Regardless, I have to say that Linus just seems like one cool guy.

    In every interview that I've read, his opinions seem well-balanced. He appears just plain nice, in the best sense of the word. I also liked his comments about "behave towards others as you'd like them to behave to you". He's right, it doesn't have to be a Christian thing (I couldn't call myself one), it just makes sense (IMHO).

    OK, enough hero worship. :)

  • Come on, have you ever used desktop apps on Linux ?
    They crash, crash hard , much more often than anything on Windows.

    1. Everyday, for at least a couple hours a day.
    2. Really? That's news to me. The only thing I can remember crashing is netscape (which crashes on every platform). And even that is reasonably stable, other than occasionally it tries to suck up 200 megs of memory.

    I imagine it has to do with WHICH applications you're running. I really haven't noticed Linux applications as being any worse than NT apps. Could you please tell us what you're running that sucks so much?
  • What a nice guy!

    Should he be made a saint or something?
  • "[nontechnical computer users]"...

    maybe he called em Lusers *grin*

  • Probably too much herring.

    :-)

    Actually, I think it comes from being married -- in my highly-nonscientific study of married geeks (myself included), I've found that every one has packed on the pounds since settling down. Though being a dad also burns them off -- it's hard to swat a toddler away from a keyboard!
  • Also, I mean, really...he looks 10 lbs. heavier every time I see him in print!

    I saw Linus in a finnish TV interview from -95 and he was at least 20kg (sorry, don't know what it is in lbs :-/) smaller :) Looked like a real geek then... But I guess those Guinnes' have made a difference. Btw. he spoke his mother tongue, Swedish, then.

  • 1783115 lines of C (.c and .h files), and 76885 lines of assembly (.s and .S files). Adds up nicely :)

    Sorry if I forgot any extensions, I didn't check the whole tree.
  • I'm sure that first release had much much less than half a million lines of code. In fact, linux-0.01.tar.gz is just 73091 bytes in size. The current linux-2.2.11.tar.gz has 14506239 bytes.
  • I have always felt (from his posts to linux-kernel, etc) that he spoke English very well. Better than most of the people here in the midwestern US, as a matter of fact. ;-) I wondered about their motivation myself.
    Not to be redundant, of course, but I thought he spoke english well (I've never heard him in person, of course). And it is often that non-native english speakers, once trained in the "full" depth and breadth of english, speak it better than native speakers, who often relax the language into their dialects, and distort it with their regional accents, etc.
  • One thing I have noted often enough is that to many people who are aware of technology, revolutions are a good thing. I completely disagree. Revolution means drastic change. Change is good. Drastic is not. In any revolution in history, much was destroyed to bring about the revolution. The same implies with computers. If a new technology is revolutionary, it must change drasticly. That means incompatability and everything needs to be rebuilt.

    OTOH, if we maintain full backwards-compatibility, we get that OS where you can run WordStar 1.0 if you really want to. (cough.) Maintaining backwards-compat. is usually a Good Thing, but it can be taken too far and can break things later on. Support:

    • "Most of the cruft in C++ results from efforts to be backwards-compatible with C." --The Jargon File, quoted in comp.lang.c and its environs as well.
    • "For compatibility with the real-mode way of doing things, the video frame buffer in PCs is usually kept in the 1st megabyte of memory 64 or 128K at a time and bank-switched." --Peter Norton's _Inside the PC_.

    Anyway, you're probably right in saying that revolutionary all-at-once change is bad for most of those involved. As someone pointed out down this thread, though, most change tends to be evolutionary--"let's just stick this new feature in here..." Thing is, after 10-15 cycles of that, the final product bears no resemblance to what you started out with. In computers, apparently, enough micro-evolution leads to macro-evolution and/or "speciation." (Look at Solaris vs. HP-UX vs. IRIX vs. AIX... all Unix at core, but verry different in so many things.)

    So don't ask for the end of Microsoft. Ask to make them smaller.

    Amen. If they had, say, 60% of the OS market, they'd make a heck of a lot of cash, and they might actually have to compete, and people might be happier because they had a choice. Seems like they want it all, though. Another part of the American Dream, I guess--"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and UNLIMITED POWER!"

  • Good post.

    The term "revolutionary" is thrown around way too much, for things that are really evolutionary. On a technical level, at least, Linux was definitely not revolutionary.

    ---------------------------------

  • Upside: You think Linux may challenge on the desktop in three or four years.

    Torvalds: In three or four years, I hope Linux will be there as an alternative for [nontechnical computer users].

    Hmmm... Lots of paraphrasing was done in this article!!! /:)

  • I think they should have titled this article "Upside publicly performs oral sex on Linus". I've never seen a bigger puff piece in my life.
  • Do you really think a Linux->Win98 comparison is fair? Sure they compare on price, but you would have to be really clueless to compare stability.
  • This guy is not a lead developer for me! :-)

    Regardless of the debate on the quality of the kernel point releases, I think a few of the big open source names (ESR, Linus) are a little drunk on their 15 minutes of fame.

    Just my .02 cents
  • Coward. His post said Word97 on Win98. If think our apps run as well under Win98 as they do under WinNT, drop me an email and I'll get you a job in microsoft marketing. ;-)
  • Perhaps she doesnt want all the attention that comes with being married to Linus. Like how most celebrities try to keep their kids away from the cameras if they can avoid it...
  • 20Kg on earth is approximately weights 45lbs.......Now I don't know about you, but I think Linus must weight must a little *bit* more that.

    On earth one Kilogram weights approximately 2.25lbs

  • (NOTE: Shameless drooling fandom follows):

    Gotta say it's fabu to see yet another flattering press piece on Da Man. Wish they would say more about his wife n kids though.

    Also, I mean, really...he looks 10 lbs. heavier every time I see him in print!

    Otherwise though it is a wonderful, wonderful interview. Shows the man's intellect and soul and all that.
  • Yeah, that pisses me off BIGTIME.



    It seems like no matter WHAT a woman accomplishes, it will NOT get written up in the US media if her hubby is famous also.



  • AC,

    Thanks for you post. Although I completely disagree with you, I liked it. Just because it discovers the difference and gives a chance to find its roots for better understanding in the future.
    It's wonderful to see how different people, reading the same text, tend to emphasize different things.
    In general, ordinary Europeans, Asians and even many of us, former Soviets, believe in reputation. Money won't buy you the name. One can be enormously rich but noone will say that he is a nice, kind and respectable person.
    Many people still believe that having just alot of money is a start- not the end. Why do they think so? Because they know that money is an extremely powerful tool. The one having extra funds stops surviving and begins bringing his dreams to reality. This person becomes a creator and changes the world we live in. What are his dreams, are they light, nice and kind? Or they are weird, cruel and mean?
    This is where upbringing acts as a regulator of vertical mobility. Ignorant, wild person doesn't deserve to posess the power of money. Ability to achieve a classical higher education (I mean Education, not just a set of technical facts) is a filter that makes moving up harder. On the other hand, there should be nothing that stops us from falling down. Nothing except our knowledge and reputation.
    People acquire knowledge while they are studying. Knowledge as understanding of things. This helps them later to gain their reputation and make their money to serve themselves and the community.
    If this is not achieved, money flows to people with dirty hands and minds, like in many places here. We are tired of their power.....
  • Hey, hey, hold the horses, man :)


    I wonder why those fine guys from debian, or redhat, or suse, or whatever linux
    distribution dont start doing their distros based on the freebsd


    As to me, I wonder, where is _your_ distro? And probably you can show us the lines in kernel written by you? Or any of your lines?
    I think you should have expected such replies- just wondering whether you have a joker in a sleeve, kinda you are a lead developer for M$ :)

  • What about
    the brilliant student who fell 1 point
    behind and had to settle for a 3-tier university?


    Brilliant stdent won't miss a point. Otherwise he's not that brilliant.


    You know what I see? I see jealous Europeans on their high-horses out-gunned by cowboy
    Americans who dropped out of school to follow their dreams and scored big time.


    I see no cowboys around here. Should I pick a microscope?


    Europeans still view themselves as better than everyone else.


    Well, not being a cowboy, I'd stop this thread. You are listening only to yourself. I never said Europeans are better, I said we are different.
    Your screams are neither informative, nor they make any sense to me. You make me yawn.
    Buh-bye, Mr Cowboy. When you grow up, we'll meet again. Probably....

    PS And yes, before you take your gun out, would you please, get your visor up? Being AC ain't any good if you intend to flame the whole continent just because you missed a point on exams.

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