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Linus Torvalds Explains How Linux Still Surprises and Motivates Him

65 points by aaronchall 9y ago

kinleyd 9y ago
Linus never ceases to inspire me - he says so much so casually: "If you can be part of a community and set up patches, ... You’ll have to spend a certain amount of time to learn a project, but there’s a huge upside -- not just from a career aspect, but having an amazing project in your life.”
adtac 9y ago
A few weeks ago I started a simple open source project that got a little bit of traction over here in HN. Since then I've had 4-5 active volunteers contributing to the project and I'm ever so thankful for them. But I've got to admit, even 4-5 active volunteers is quite taxing on my time: I need to spend a fair bit of time reviewing stuff, triaging issues, updating the README or the code to be more newcomer friendly and what not. I can't even imagine that in a 1000x scale, which is what Linus has done (I know that he has people working under him taking care of certain sections of the kernel, but it's still incredible how he has managed so many people, companies and organizations for so long so efficiently). Linux will always be one of the greatest man-made efforts ever.
- guy6 9y ago
  It's very simple don't pander. Spend your time on the people who waste your time the least. It's a self fulfilling prophecy after that.
blacksmythe 9y ago
>> The 2-3 weeks I worked on Git to get that started for example. His side-project, kicked-off in 2-3 weeks :). This would be a lifetime project for most people.
- adtac 9y ago
  There are now entire industries built around those 2-3 weeks :D But then again, when you write a pretty awesome kernel at the age of 21, you end up doing stuff like that.
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  There must be a guinness record somewhere in those two projects (linux and git).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
> For the first 3 to 4 years, the complaint about Git was it was so different and hard to use. About 5 years ago something changed It's still hard to use IMHO, once you deep dive into it, the complexity start to rise up to the point where a complete reset of the repo is required but anyway "what changed" is that Google Code close and suddenly every svn backed project looked for alternatives, the easiest one being "git" since it has a compat API for svn repos, later Jr's started learning git at school and ditched svn et al and now everyone chooses git for default, not because its great, but because everyone is using it and GitHub exploded in popularity due to "social coding" being the norm.
- revmoo 9y ago
  The problem is devs who "deep dive" into Git. I have a very simple workflow and it has treated me well for years, and I never ever run into complications.
KangooDude 9y ago
It is GNU/Linux, also happy to know his sweet talk with VMware Head of (stealing) Open Source. Gold Linus foundation member status makes friendship and magic.
- revmoo 9y ago
  Yeah ok dude

65 points by aaronchall 9y ago

Linus never ceases to inspire me - he says so much so casually: "If you can be part of a community and set up patches, ... You’ll have to spend a certain amount of time to learn a project, but there’s a huge upside -- not just from a career aspect, but having an amazing project in your life.”

adtac 9y ago

A few weeks ago I started a simple open source project that got a little bit of traction over here in HN. Since then I've had 4-5 active volunteers contributing to the project and I'm ever so thankful for them. But I've got to admit, even 4-5 active volunteers is quite taxing on my time: I need to spend a fair bit of time reviewing stuff, triaging issues, updating the README or the code to be more newcomer friendly and what not. I can't even imagine that in a 1000x scale, which is what Linus has done (I know that he has people working under him taking care of certain sections of the kernel, but it's still incredible how he has managed so many people, companies and organizations for so long so efficiently). Linux will always be one of the greatest man-made efforts ever.

guy6 9y ago
It's very simple don't pander. Spend your time on the people who waste your time the least. It's a self fulfilling prophecy after that.

blacksmythe 9y ago

>> The 2-3 weeks I worked on Git to get that started for example. His side-project, kicked-off in 2-3 weeks :). This would be a lifetime project for most people.

adtac 9y ago
There are now entire industries built around those 2-3 weeks :D But then again, when you write a pretty awesome kernel at the age of 21, you end up doing stuff like that.
mirekrusin 9y ago
There must be a guinness record somewhere in those two projects (linux and git).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

> For the first 3 to 4 years, the complaint about Git was it was so different and hard to use. About 5 years ago something changed It's still hard to use IMHO, once you deep dive into it, the complexity start to rise up to the point where a complete reset of the repo is required but anyway "what changed" is that Google Code close and suddenly every svn backed project looked for alternatives, the easiest one being "git" since it has a compat API for svn repos, later Jr's started learning git at school and ditched svn et al and now everyone chooses git for default, not because its great, but because everyone is using it and GitHub exploded in popularity due to "social coding" being the norm.

revmoo 9y ago
The problem is devs who "deep dive" into Git. I have a very simple workflow and it has treated me well for years, and I never ever run into complications.

KangooDude 9y ago

It is GNU/Linux, also happy to know his sweet talk with VMware Head of (stealing) Open Source. Gold Linus foundation member status makes friendship and magic.

revmoo 9y ago
Yeah ok dude