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Linux is amazing! From 86% of the world's smartphones to pretty much all of the top500 supercomputers to millions of Chromebooks in schools to tens of millions

Linux is amazing! From 86% of the world's smartphones to pretty much all of the top500 supercomputers to millions of Chromebooks in schools to tens of millions of critical servers to umpteen embedded uses I've never even heard of! Linus must be considered one of the greatest project managers ever (seriously!)...results don't lie. His manner is almost identical to Leslie Groves, who managed both the construction of the Pentagon and then the Manhattan Project (greatest engineering project in history). Some tasks seem to demand people who don't need to be liked. It is just incredible that we can use something as awesome as Linux in a free and open manner. Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss!

vacri 10y ago
> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! He's not a jerk. People just like to post writings of his, out of context. My favourite out-of-context post of his was here on HN where it was the typical "oo, isn't Linus sweary!" porn. It was post ~150 of a mailthread, and he was blowing up at a user. I went back through the thread, and this was post #12 of Linus's, and most of his previous comments were politely trying to help that same user understand a concept. The user was being dickish and probably intentionally obstructive.
- flukus 10y ago
  Same thing happened with the vim/neovim split. Bram gets the blame for being obstructive because he wouldn't unquestioningly accept a patch.
flukus 10y ago
> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! When you put it into perspective like that, he's not a jerk, just someone who has had a statistically insignificant number of bad days. I'd like to see any other person on earth deal with their project being pulled in that many directions and act like a saint. I'd have told you all to go and get fucked long ago.
marcoperaza 10y ago
In my experience, people being nice instead of being honest leads to millions of dollars and man-decades of time being wasted.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  It's not often an either or, you can be polite and honest.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    Politeness is a good thing to strive for much of the time, but I also think that no-bullshit directness is just as important, if not more so. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less direct we become as a people, the more sensitive people become to it, the more offense they take to it, the less direct we become, and so forth. Basically, Linus is a valiant anti-bullshit warrior.
    - dastbe 10y ago
      yeah but you can be anti-bullshit and not be a jerk.
mikekchar 10y ago
Most people don't remember (or weren't around to see) what it was like before Linux. IMHO Linus's biggest contribution to the world was the modern open source development methodology. In my 4th year at university I did a project on Mach and was very excited to continue working with it through the HURD. At the time, getting up to date source code for the HURD required sending an email to the team and requesting it. I dutifully did so and was greeted with a reply asking for my CV. I sent it in (as bare as you might imagine it would be as a university student) and was denied access since they only wanted experienced kernel developers to work on the project. I've often regretted not saving that email. But this is the way it was back then. You waited until something was released to play with it, or you contacted the team to see if they would grant you access to the latest development code. Linus changed all that by giving ubiquitous access to the code and taking patches from anyone. It was a huge revelation. Keep in mind that this coincided with more open access to the internet, so his attitude was facilitated by the fact that you didn't need to rely on UUCP to slowly distribute code. More and more, people had access to FTP (and soon the web). The reason for Linux's success, IMHO, is down to that. Everyone flocked to Linux because it was obviously unencumbered by the BSD legal issues and Linus would look at any patch coming his way, regardless of who sent it. This is now de rigour -- to the point where I'm sure the vast majority of people using free software today believe that it's always been that way. For me, RMS invented the concept of free software. Linus showed how to actually make it work. There were other good projects at the time, but from my perspective nothing came close to Linux.
- notaplumber 10y ago
  > Linus's biggest contribution to the world was the modern open source development methodology. OpenBSD made a pretty big contribution as well. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    It's a fair point. I often wonder what would have happened without the potential BSD lawsuits hanging over everything. I remember at the time being torn between installing Linux on my box or BSD. When mmap was finally implemented on Linux, I decided (rather unhappily IIRC) to go with it thinking it was the "safer" choice. One thing to keep in mind, though, wrt OpenBSD is that by the time it arrived on the scene, Linux was well and truly established. The better comparison is NetBSD, which showed up in 1993, but even then Linux was in the fabled 0.99 version (and rapidly running out of letters). It was really Linus's actions before that time that cemented Linux as a legitimate contender -- he had attracted a really large number of very talented programmers. NetBSD, if memory serves, was suffering from a fair amount of internal infighting which eventually ended up with Theo de Raadt being ousted.
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Mainline Linux runs on approximately 0% of the world's smartphones, it is forks all the way down.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that companies maintain patchsets that they periodically update to apply to newer mainline versions. A lot of it ends up merged into mainline eventually. They're not really forks.
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    Most are are actually forks or just abandoned after release.

vacri 10y ago

> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! He's not a jerk. People just like to post writings of his, out of context. My favourite out-of-context post of his was here on HN where it was the typical "oo, isn't Linus sweary!" porn. It was post ~150 of a mailthread, and he was blowing up at a user. I went back through the thread, and this was post #12 of Linus's, and most of his previous comments were politely trying to help that same user understand a concept. The user was being dickish and probably intentionally obstructive.

flukus 10y ago
Same thing happened with the vim/neovim split. Bram gets the blame for being obstructive because he wouldn't unquestioningly accept a patch.

flukus 10y ago

> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! When you put it into perspective like that, he's not a jerk, just someone who has had a statistically insignificant number of bad days. I'd like to see any other person on earth deal with their project being pulled in that many directions and act like a saint. I'd have told you all to go and get fucked long ago.

marcoperaza 10y ago

In my experience, people being nice instead of being honest leads to millions of dollars and man-decades of time being wasted.

tonyedgecombe 10y ago
It's not often an either or, you can be polite and honest.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  Politeness is a good thing to strive for much of the time, but I also think that no-bullshit directness is just as important, if not more so. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less direct we become as a people, the more sensitive people become to it, the more offense they take to it, the less direct we become, and so forth. Basically, Linus is a valiant anti-bullshit warrior.
  - dastbe 10y ago
    yeah but you can be anti-bullshit and not be a jerk.

mikekchar 10y ago

Most people don't remember (or weren't around to see) what it was like before Linux. IMHO Linus's biggest contribution to the world was the modern open source development methodology. In my 4th year at university I did a project on Mach and was very excited to continue working with it through the HURD. At the time, getting up to date source code for the HURD required sending an email to the team and requesting it. I dutifully did so and was greeted with a reply asking for my CV. I sent it in (as bare as you might imagine it would be as a university student) and was denied access since they only wanted experienced kernel developers to work on the project. I've often regretted not saving that email. But this is the way it was back then. You waited until something was released to play with it, or you contacted the team to see if they would grant you access to the latest development code. Linus changed all that by giving ubiquitous access to the code and taking patches from anyone. It was a huge revelation. Keep in mind that this coincided with more open access to the internet, so his attitude was facilitated by the fact that you didn't need to rely on UUCP to slowly distribute code. More and more, people had access to FTP (and soon the web). The reason for Linux's success, IMHO, is down to that. Everyone flocked to Linux because it was obviously unencumbered by the BSD legal issues and Linus would look at any patch coming his way, regardless of who sent it. This is now de rigour -- to the point where I'm sure the vast majority of people using free software today believe that it's always been that way. For me, RMS invented the concept of free software. Linus showed how to actually make it work. There were other good projects at the time, but from my perspective nothing came close to Linux.

notaplumber 10y ago
> Linus's biggest contribution to the world was the modern open source development methodology. OpenBSD made a pretty big contribution as well. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf
- mikekchar 10y ago
  It's a fair point. I often wonder what would have happened without the potential BSD lawsuits hanging over everything. I remember at the time being torn between installing Linux on my box or BSD. When mmap was finally implemented on Linux, I decided (rather unhappily IIRC) to go with it thinking it was the "safer" choice. One thing to keep in mind, though, wrt OpenBSD is that by the time it arrived on the scene, Linux was well and truly established. The better comparison is NetBSD, which showed up in 1993, but even then Linux was in the fabled 0.99 version (and rapidly running out of letters). It was really Linus's actions before that time that cemented Linux as a legitimate contender -- he had attracted a really large number of very talented programmers. NetBSD, if memory serves, was suffering from a fair amount of internal infighting which eventually ended up with Theo de Raadt being ousted.

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Mainline Linux runs on approximately 0% of the world's smartphones, it is forks all the way down.

marcoperaza 10y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that companies maintain patchsets that they periodically update to apply to newer mainline versions. A lot of it ends up merged into mainline eventually. They're not really forks.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  Most are are actually forks or just abandoned after release.