7 ms·

Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention

83 points by draegtun 16y ago

famousactress 16y ago
I'm wondering what other folks think. I mean, as nicely as git's put together.. there was precedence for it as well. It just seems conveniently controversial to put git above Linux.
- drats 16y ago
  "conveniently controversial" aka link/flame bait
charlief 16y ago
Git may be more innovative, but Linux is hands-down Linus Torvalds' greatest creation.
- kiba 16y ago
  It did inspires ESR to write the Cathederal and the Bazaar.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Linux inspired ESR's literary output the same way the invention of plastic inspired the proliferation of lawn-ornaments. The influence is there and non-negligible, but I can think of a billion other things, far more useful and creative, that benefited the same.
    - 8ren 16y ago
      I found CatB extremely useful. I've heard a lot of hate for esr's work, and I'm curious about it. Perhaps it's just backlash, from his previous very high popularity. So, could you elaborate with specific criticisms of CatB?
      - mahmud 16y ago
        I think I can write more inspired criticism of cardboard, or styrofoam. Please, let me do those instead. Or just go to his blog and read the second article: "Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like." The entire place is an altar to the man. Even Stuxnet, the super interesting piece of industrial hacking. Even it didn't escape ESR's blessing wand: "[My friend] incited me to blog by asking me the following question: “Would you call the perpetrators of the Stuxnet worm `hackers’, rather than crackers”?" The entire security scene stood up in awe, given the combination of effort and ingenuity. But not ESR, he found this an opportunity to play pope and bestow titles.
        8ren 16y ago
        OK... I'll just note that that's not a specific criticism of CatB.
        kiba 16y ago
        If you have nothing to say but ad hominem and calling his literacy output cardboard without backing it up, maybe you should say nothing at all. We now know that you hate ESR's self promoting behaviors, but where is the substance?
        mahmud 16y ago
        ESR's self promoting behaviors The substance is lacking because I am not motivated enough to think harder about the man's writing. Something switched in my head and one day I realized he was the antithesis of the hacker-ethic he preaches. "Real Hackers", much like the real Scotsmen, work silently, are under-appreciated, and often unknown. Having said that, it takes one to know one; given an audience the size of his, I am 100% certain I would go on a similar journey of self-worship and rampant "blow-hardery". Ahhh! what wouldn't I do for unearned public recognition and a permanent podium.
- flogic 16y ago
  Really, Linus's greatest work is the organizing he's done. People can argue about how great Linux or Git are. What really stands out is the community focus on them. They've passed a technical threshold, where their community benefits completely outweigh any competition's technical benefits.
- beza1e1 16y ago
  We should be careful about words here. Invention, innovation and creation are all different things. Linux and git are both innovations, as they made known concepts (Unix kernel, DVCS) useable by the masses. They are hardly inventions, because they did not present new ideas or concepts. If they are creations ist debatable. Linus himself says Linux has "evolved", which means there is no specific creator, hence no creation. On the other hand git is (initially) completely created by Linus.
gruseom 16y ago
I've wondered about that too (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455864 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455864).
randombit 16y ago
Using an acyclic graph of chained hashes to represent change history has a long history in revision control - it was used in Monotone (which Linus considered as an option instead of writing git, but rejected as it was written in C++), in OpenCM, in Xanadu, and probably in at least half a dozen other systems I've never heard of.
- JoelMcCracken 16y ago
  I would have thought so. Hashes aren't so special as to warrant all that attention.
- adambyrtek 16y ago
  Small correction, Linus rejected Monotone because it had been horribly slow on the huge Linux source tree. Git was focused on performance from the outset, where Monotone cares more about integrity and correctness than speed. That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on C++.
  - lambda 16y ago
    Well, one of the big problems in Monotone back in the day was that since they (we? I contributed a bit to Monotone, but was never a core contributor) broke people's repos several times with data integrity bugs, and so got very paranoid and added lots of slow integrity checks to make sure that didn't happen any more. Part of the reason for the breakage was that they were still experimenting with the basic representation of history, merge algorithms, and the like, and so had to do data migrations quite often, which sometimes introduced bugs. Git had the advantage that it could learn from Monotone's mistakes, and focus on speed, and not have to experiment as much since much of the basic design ideas were already there. Git also made several better architectural choices, I believe, going with a much more simple and stable repository format than Monotone had.
  - lucisferre 16y ago
    I think you have to take what he has said about C++, or OO in general in context. What he said (at least what I've read) was that C++ would never make sense for the kernel, and his reasoning seems sound to me I've always taken the opinion that OO makes sense where one needs the ability to model abstract systems in a way that can express and even explain them through the code. Modeling an computer doesn't require or benefit as much from such abstractions.
tzs 16y ago
I personally know a dozen people who could have written the Linux kernel, at around the time Linus wrote it. What none of them could have done, through, is manage the project when it took off the way Linus did. I suspect 100 years from now, the place you will hear the name "Linus Torvalds" the most will be in management classes in business and engineering school. His actual software will be a footnote, merely the platform upon which he demonstrated how to manage a large open source project. Kind of like Henry Ford and the automobile--Ford made important contributions to the development of the automobile itself, but it is his figuring out how to make the automobile factory that is the main thing we remember him for.
- joeycfan 16y ago
  Good call. Both Theo De Raadt and Richard Stallman could handle it - but they're both dicks and Linus isn't. A good lesson - how you treat other people is important.
bugmenot 16y ago
Too bad he wrote the UI for it.
tuxychandru 16y ago
Didn't Linus himself mention that bitkeeper was where Git's inspiration came from? Just like UNIX, bitkeeper was proprietary but it did work out many things for Git to use.

83 points by draegtun 16y ago

I'm wondering what other folks think. I mean, as nicely as git's put together.. there was precedence for it as well. It just seems conveniently controversial to put git above Linux.

drats 16y ago
"conveniently controversial" aka link/flame bait

charlief 16y ago

Git may be more innovative, but Linux is hands-down Linus Torvalds' greatest creation.

kiba 16y ago
It did inspires ESR to write the Cathederal and the Bazaar.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Linux inspired ESR's literary output the same way the invention of plastic inspired the proliferation of lawn-ornaments. The influence is there and non-negligible, but I can think of a billion other things, far more useful and creative, that benefited the same.
  - 8ren 16y ago
    I found CatB extremely useful. I've heard a lot of hate for esr's work, and I'm curious about it. Perhaps it's just backlash, from his previous very high popularity. So, could you elaborate with specific criticisms of CatB?
    - mahmud 16y ago
      I think I can write more inspired criticism of cardboard, or styrofoam. Please, let me do those instead. Or just go to his blog and read the second article: "Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like." The entire place is an altar to the man. Even Stuxnet, the super interesting piece of industrial hacking. Even it didn't escape ESR's blessing wand: "[My friend] incited me to blog by asking me the following question: “Would you call the perpetrators of the Stuxnet worm `hackers’, rather than crackers”?" The entire security scene stood up in awe, given the combination of effort and ingenuity. But not ESR, he found this an opportunity to play pope and bestow titles.
      - 8ren 16y ago
        OK... I'll just note that that's not a specific criticism of CatB.
      - kiba 16y ago
        If you have nothing to say but ad hominem and calling his literacy output cardboard without backing it up, maybe you should say nothing at all. We now know that you hate ESR's self promoting behaviors, but where is the substance?
        mahmud 16y ago
        ESR's self promoting behaviors The substance is lacking because I am not motivated enough to think harder about the man's writing. Something switched in my head and one day I realized he was the antithesis of the hacker-ethic he preaches. "Real Hackers", much like the real Scotsmen, work silently, are under-appreciated, and often unknown. Having said that, it takes one to know one; given an audience the size of his, I am 100% certain I would go on a similar journey of self-worship and rampant "blow-hardery". Ahhh! what wouldn't I do for unearned public recognition and a permanent podium.
flogic 16y ago
Really, Linus's greatest work is the organizing he's done. People can argue about how great Linux or Git are. What really stands out is the community focus on them. They've passed a technical threshold, where their community benefits completely outweigh any competition's technical benefits.
beza1e1 16y ago
We should be careful about words here. Invention, innovation and creation are all different things. Linux and git are both innovations, as they made known concepts (Unix kernel, DVCS) useable by the masses. They are hardly inventions, because they did not present new ideas or concepts. If they are creations ist debatable. Linus himself says Linux has "evolved", which means there is no specific creator, hence no creation. On the other hand git is (initially) completely created by Linus.

gruseom 16y ago

I've wondered about that too (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455864 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455864).

randombit 16y ago

Using an acyclic graph of chained hashes to represent change history has a long history in revision control - it was used in Monotone (which Linus considered as an option instead of writing git, but rejected as it was written in C++), in OpenCM, in Xanadu, and probably in at least half a dozen other systems I've never heard of.

JoelMcCracken 16y ago
I would have thought so. Hashes aren't so special as to warrant all that attention.
adambyrtek 16y ago
Small correction, Linus rejected Monotone because it had been horribly slow on the huge Linux source tree. Git was focused on performance from the outset, where Monotone cares more about integrity and correctness than speed. That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on C++.
- lambda 16y ago
  Well, one of the big problems in Monotone back in the day was that since they (we? I contributed a bit to Monotone, but was never a core contributor) broke people's repos several times with data integrity bugs, and so got very paranoid and added lots of slow integrity checks to make sure that didn't happen any more. Part of the reason for the breakage was that they were still experimenting with the basic representation of history, merge algorithms, and the like, and so had to do data migrations quite often, which sometimes introduced bugs. Git had the advantage that it could learn from Monotone's mistakes, and focus on speed, and not have to experiment as much since much of the basic design ideas were already there. Git also made several better architectural choices, I believe, going with a much more simple and stable repository format than Monotone had.
- lucisferre 16y ago
  I think you have to take what he has said about C++, or OO in general in context. What he said (at least what I've read) was that C++ would never make sense for the kernel, and his reasoning seems sound to me I've always taken the opinion that OO makes sense where one needs the ability to model abstract systems in a way that can express and even explain them through the code. Modeling an computer doesn't require or benefit as much from such abstractions.

tzs 16y ago

I personally know a dozen people who could have written the Linux kernel, at around the time Linus wrote it. What none of them could have done, through, is manage the project when it took off the way Linus did. I suspect 100 years from now, the place you will hear the name "Linus Torvalds" the most will be in management classes in business and engineering school. His actual software will be a footnote, merely the platform upon which he demonstrated how to manage a large open source project. Kind of like Henry Ford and the automobile--Ford made important contributions to the development of the automobile itself, but it is his figuring out how to make the automobile factory that is the main thing we remember him for.

joeycfan 16y ago
Good call. Both Theo De Raadt and Richard Stallman could handle it - but they're both dicks and Linus isn't. A good lesson - how you treat other people is important.

bugmenot 16y ago

Too bad he wrote the UI for it.

tuxychandru 16y ago

Didn't Linus himself mention that bitkeeper was where Git's inspiration came from? Just like UNIX, bitkeeper was proprietary but it did work out many things for Git to use.