10 ms·

30 Years of Linux: An Interview with Linus Torvalds

155 points by AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

ObserverNeutral 6y ago
This guy is Buterin 30 years from now. Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term. There is an initial wave of enthusiasm which provides a time window to unload the bags though.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich". And who the heck do you think is "blindly following him"?
  - blippage 6y ago
    > Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich". My guess: VHNWI (very high net worth individual), defined by Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hnwi.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hnwi.asp as the range $5m to $30m. Maybe he's even in the ultra HNWI range. He doesn't "look" rich, but then, what does rich look like anyway?
    - zabzonk 6y ago
      I think a reasonable value for "rich" is having a good roof over your head, enough money to comfortably support you and your family for the foreseeable future, and to be doing something you really enjoy.
      - _nalply 6y ago
        I wish more people would understand this. Even if your neighbor has a bigger private jet than you there's no need to escalate.
    - philzook 6y ago
      https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-torvalds-net-worth/#:~:text=Linus%20Torvalds%20Net%20Worth%20and,net%20worth%20of%20%2450%20million https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-.... Linus is doing fine.
  - ObserverNeutral 6y ago
    Compare him against Bill Gates and Larry Page. Also when I said blindly follow the Open Source project leader I was referring to Buterin and Nakamoto
- Bancakes 6y ago
  Why do successful people always have to be rich? That's such a toxic silicon valley expectation.
  - ObserverNeutral 6y ago
    Because it's not like you write songs which make people dream and fill a stadium to come and hear you play them Nor you are acting in movies which again make people dream and embrace you as part of their life. You are writing freaking code, if you don't get the money, all you are left with is the tepid admiration of nerds around the world...can't imagine anybody desiring that. If Linus were to create a startup tomorrow it's not like people would waive their salary for the opportunity to work for the great man. To summarize if you don't get money you are left with absolutely nothing in hand.
    - robotbikes 6y ago
      This maybe true for you but I know that I get a sense of satisfaction from releasing free software and knowing that people around the world are benefitting from it. Not everyone seems financial riches as the end goal of their efforts. Most musicians don't get boatloads of cash or to perform in stadiums but instead the appreciation of a handful of people who enjoy their music. It does depend on your motivation for writing the code as well. If you are coding to solve someone else's problem and feel no benefit from it then indeed money is typically expected.
      - ObserverNeutral 6y ago
        > Most musicians don't get boatloads of cash or to perform in stadiums but instead the appreciation of a handful of people who enjoy their music. I think there is a whole world of difference between 60,000 people singing along to something you wrote and having 6,000,000 visits to your Github folder. Unless you are a robot the 2 feel and therefore are completely different feelings. Matter of fact the first is a feeling, the second is an acknowledgement that your code works fine. Businessmen seek to add monetary compensation to the aforementioned acknowledgement , because they know that the sole acknowledgement is not enough to propel future goals they might have.....including playing music in a stadium such as the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen did, or hosting a music festival such as Steve Wozniak US festival
- smoldesu 6y ago
  Nobody distributes free software to be rich. Not sure where you're grabbing all this from...
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Not sure if this is true in general: many paid-for software products have free versions; free games might offer in-game purchases, etc.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      That's not what the parent comment meant by free software (i.e. they meant freedom, not price).
- cassepipe 6y ago
  > First off, I'm doing quite well. I'm not insanely rich, but I'm a well-paid software engineer, doing what I like to do, on my own schedule. I'm not hurting.
Exmoor 6y ago
Every once in a while I try to imagine a world where Linux never existed. Some software feels sort-of inevitable. For instance, even if Microsoft and Apple's desktop operating systems had failed, it seems almost certain that there would have been a dominant desktop graphical operating system (OS/2, etc.) so the landscape would have looked fairly similar to today. Linux just feels different. There have been other open source operating systems, but to me it doesn't feel like they would have inherently taken over the same market that Linux has now if it had never existed. Like, do I really think my phone, my VM server, and my cloud computing infrastructure would be running FreeBSD in this parallel universe? Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems. Like, for example, one written by Apple?
  - rdsnsca 6y ago
    or Microsoft.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  They probably wouldn't be running the same OS if it was licenced under a BSD licence - the GPL encourages Linux-like projects to be both open and centralized which is why we have Linux today.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  > a world where Linux never existed would be dominated by the BSDs!
  - nickt 6y ago
    Not sure if you’re talking about Berkeley Software Distribution of Blue Screen of Death but I suppose either would be right!
Jiocus 6y ago
Torvalds on his coding environment, > I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. Hell yes.
- pestatije 6y ago
  There you go! After 30 years the light turns on.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  From what I see, nano has pretty much already replaced vi(m) as the standard command-line text editor in Linux (not sure about other UNIX-likes). I believe it is also available for Windows, which is nice...
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    micro has recently stolen the easy to use, portable, terminal editor niche with its sane CUA keybindings.
    - Jiocus 6y ago
      First time I hear of this steal.
- guenthert 6y ago
  I think it's noteworthy, how little his choice of editor (or most other tools, including distribution) matters for the rest of us happily using Linux.
kingsuper20 6y ago
So when does the cruft and craziness build up to the point that you have to start all over again again?
- reirob 6y ago
  There is actually a similar question that is asked in the interview: > Is there anything in the kernel which is not optimal, but would require a complete rewrite to address properly? In other words, the kernel is 30 years old and knowledge, languages and hardware have changed a lot in these 30 years: if you rewrote it from scratch now, what would you change? And Linus' answer was very interesting for me - and after reading it, I would answer your question (tongue in cheek): "Never, because it seems that Linux developers were quite successful in starting all over again for quite some parts of the Linux kernel." I guess it's not really an answer to your question, but kind-of ;)
  - kingsuper20 6y ago
    No doubt any replacement would have to be enough better that it's worth the cost (opportunity and otherwise) to both produce and switch to it. Perhaps security/privacy issues might drive a serious rehatching of commonly used software. It occurred to me that there's enough inertia at this point that you'll likely only see ground-up architecture and/or implementation when some sort of hardware substrate is produced that requires it. Until then, we are on the karmic wheel of cpus that drive os/language design that drive cpu design.
    - sagarm 6y ago
      Google is building a new OS called Fuchsia, with no new hardware to drive it was far as I know.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Well, even now Linux is not the only choice (in theory, anyway). As far as desktop, Haiku does not look bad at all. On the server, a BSD is all you need.
julianna01k 6y ago
A very interesting interview. 70% of my YouTube subscriptions are channels with interviews of people from different fields. I transcribe the most interesting videos into text using https://audext.com/ https://audext.com/
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  You can also use vtt2txt.py[1] which is free, e.g. take the auto-generated subs from youtube and then convert them with vtt2txt.py: youtube-dl --skip-download --convert-subs vtt <video_url> python3 vtt2text.py some-video.en.vtt [1] https://gist.github.com/glasslion/b2fcad16bc8a9630dbd7a945ab5ebf5e https://gist.github.com/glasslion/b2fcad16bc8a9630dbd7a945ab...
- Rompect 6y ago
  *This is an ad.*
3pt14159 6y ago
I love how Linus gave so much credit to Junio and downplayed his own personal role in the project.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  He probably regrets not calling it JuniOS.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Wrong project.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Also, Torvalds didn't want to call Linux Linux initially (but didn't really complain when the name was pushed on him).
  - jefurii 6y ago
    I read an interview where he says that he names all of his projects after himself.
bombcar 6y ago
[He] Started Linux 30 years ago, and git 15 years ago ... sounds like we're due another big project. Someone change the license on something Torvalds uses and piss him off!
- TacticalCoder 6y ago
  Wow: that is very early adoption! I'd say Linux, with Slackware, around 1994 (?). Git took me a bit longer for as I was a happy Mercurial user but once I saw the momentum shifting heavily towards Git I switched.
  - qw3rty01 6y ago
    30 and 15 years was when Linus started writing each
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Yeah, updated to make that more clear - though I wasn't insanely far behind on Linux (and had I been a bit older I might have been closer to the beginning). During the source control wars I was firmly in the Bazaar camp, however - but it seems everything but git is now moribund.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  If he allows another language in Linux, there is nothing that could piss him off anymore.
  - 1_player 6y ago
    I'd love a new C-inspired language (no, Rust is C++-inspired) made from a pragmatic developer like Torvalds. Zig comes very close IMO, but it's still too unstable to be under Linus' radar.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I think having a new production quality C-inspired language is just not practical anymore. There was a thread about improving C language with the auto keyword with a long and well thought out standardization process. After adding some of these features that are clearly missing, there won't be too much improvement possibility compared to C while keeping a C-like type system to warrant the huge amount of work to create a new language.
runawaybottle 6y ago
And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's. College can really lock you into one editor or another for a lifetime.
- bombcar 6y ago
  There's something fundamental about your first "keystroke shortcut" learning - I believe Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts long after 1-2-3 ceased being a force in the market.
vhold 6y ago
First thing I searched for is GCC and I'm really glad he emphasizes how important it was to the origins of Linux. It's historically under appreciated how critical GCC was at that time, how it had far far reaching impacts that changed the path of computing globally. GCC not only makes Linux possible, but it brought the other unixes closer together, which is instrumental to escaping the vendor lock of the various *nix vendors. That means by the time Linux is reliable enough for production, there is already a lot of cross-platform software to run on it.
- bombcar 6y ago
  People make fun of the GNU Hurd project, but GNU really did work on the toolset in nearly the best order possible; a compiler is fundamental and without it you have nothing. It took decades for LLVM to finally appear as a workable alternative; even the BSDs relied on GCC.
guenthert 6y ago
I'm sure that topic had been discussed to death long time ago, but I enjoyed reading about the original reasoning for picking the GPL as license for Linux as stated here in this interview.
udev 6y ago
When/where can we read the second part of the interview?
- crescit_eundo 6y ago
  From the article: "Check back next week for the second part, where Linus explores the lessons and insights gained from three decades at the helm of the Linux kernel."
ilamont 6y ago
Impressed that he sees communication as one of his primary responsibilities. I don't think this gets enough recognition at distributed organizations, whose members often take communications for granted or fail to recognize how powerful it can be as a mechanism for more effective everything. I was also struck by his comments about the preferred tool, email: Email really ends up being a wonderful tool, and we didn't rely on face-to-face meetings.

155 points by AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

This guy is Buterin 30 years from now. Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term. There is an initial wave of enthusiasm which provides a time window to unload the bags though.

zabzonk 6y ago
> Open Source won't ever make the inventor (and those who blindly follow him) rich in the long term Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich". And who the heck do you think is "blindly following him"?
- blippage 6y ago
  > Torvalds seems to have done OK for himself, for reasonable values of "rich". My guess: VHNWI (very high net worth individual), defined by Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hnwi.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hnwi.asp as the range $5m to $30m. Maybe he's even in the ultra HNWI range. He doesn't "look" rich, but then, what does rich look like anyway?
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    I think a reasonable value for "rich" is having a good roof over your head, enough money to comfortably support you and your family for the foreseeable future, and to be doing something you really enjoy.
    - _nalply 6y ago
      I wish more people would understand this. Even if your neighbor has a bigger private jet than you there's no need to escalate.
  - philzook 6y ago
    https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-torvalds-net-worth/#:~:text=Linus%20Torvalds%20Net%20Worth%20and,net%20worth%20of%20%2450%20million https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-.... Linus is doing fine.
- ObserverNeutral 6y ago
  Compare him against Bill Gates and Larry Page. Also when I said blindly follow the Open Source project leader I was referring to Buterin and Nakamoto
Bancakes 6y ago
Why do successful people always have to be rich? That's such a toxic silicon valley expectation.
- ObserverNeutral 6y ago
  Because it's not like you write songs which make people dream and fill a stadium to come and hear you play them Nor you are acting in movies which again make people dream and embrace you as part of their life. You are writing freaking code, if you don't get the money, all you are left with is the tepid admiration of nerds around the world...can't imagine anybody desiring that. If Linus were to create a startup tomorrow it's not like people would waive their salary for the opportunity to work for the great man. To summarize if you don't get money you are left with absolutely nothing in hand.
  - robotbikes 6y ago
    This maybe true for you but I know that I get a sense of satisfaction from releasing free software and knowing that people around the world are benefitting from it. Not everyone seems financial riches as the end goal of their efforts. Most musicians don't get boatloads of cash or to perform in stadiums but instead the appreciation of a handful of people who enjoy their music. It does depend on your motivation for writing the code as well. If you are coding to solve someone else's problem and feel no benefit from it then indeed money is typically expected.
    - ObserverNeutral 6y ago
      > Most musicians don't get boatloads of cash or to perform in stadiums but instead the appreciation of a handful of people who enjoy their music. I think there is a whole world of difference between 60,000 people singing along to something you wrote and having 6,000,000 visits to your Github folder. Unless you are a robot the 2 feel and therefore are completely different feelings. Matter of fact the first is a feeling, the second is an acknowledgement that your code works fine. Businessmen seek to add monetary compensation to the aforementioned acknowledgement , because they know that the sole acknowledgement is not enough to propel future goals they might have.....including playing music in a stadium such as the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen did, or hosting a music festival such as Steve Wozniak US festival
smoldesu 6y ago
Nobody distributes free software to be rich. Not sure where you're grabbing all this from...
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Not sure if this is true in general: many paid-for software products have free versions; free games might offer in-game purchases, etc.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    That's not what the parent comment meant by free software (i.e. they meant freedom, not price).
cassepipe 6y ago
> First off, I'm doing quite well. I'm not insanely rich, but I'm a well-paid software engineer, doing what I like to do, on my own schedule. I'm not hurting.

Exmoor 6y ago

Every once in a while I try to imagine a world where Linux never existed. Some software feels sort-of inevitable. For instance, even if Microsoft and Apple's desktop operating systems had failed, it seems almost certain that there would have been a dominant desktop graphical operating system (OS/2, etc.) so the landscape would have looked fairly similar to today. Linux just feels different. There have been other open source operating systems, but to me it doesn't feel like they would have inherently taken over the same market that Linux has now if it had never existed. Like, do I really think my phone, my VM server, and my cloud computing infrastructure would be running FreeBSD in this parallel universe? Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems.

zabzonk 6y ago
> Maybe, but I suspect they would have more likely ended up using separate, more-closed, operating systems. Like, for example, one written by Apple?
- rdsnsca 6y ago
  or Microsoft.
mhh__ 6y ago
They probably wouldn't be running the same OS if it was licenced under a BSD licence - the GPL encourages Linux-like projects to be both open and centralized which is why we have Linux today.
Koshkin 6y ago
> a world where Linux never existed would be dominated by the BSDs!
- nickt 6y ago
  Not sure if you’re talking about Berkeley Software Distribution of Blue Screen of Death but I suppose either would be right!

Jiocus 6y ago

Torvalds on his coding environment, > I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. Hell yes.

pestatije 6y ago
There you go! After 30 years the light turns on.
Koshkin 6y ago
From what I see, nano has pretty much already replaced vi(m) as the standard command-line text editor in Linux (not sure about other UNIX-likes). I believe it is also available for Windows, which is nice...
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  micro has recently stolen the easy to use, portable, terminal editor niche with its sane CUA keybindings.
  - Jiocus 6y ago
    First time I hear of this steal.
guenthert 6y ago
I think it's noteworthy, how little his choice of editor (or most other tools, including distribution) matters for the rest of us happily using Linux.

kingsuper20 6y ago

So when does the cruft and craziness build up to the point that you have to start all over again again?

reirob 6y ago
There is actually a similar question that is asked in the interview: > Is there anything in the kernel which is not optimal, but would require a complete rewrite to address properly? In other words, the kernel is 30 years old and knowledge, languages and hardware have changed a lot in these 30 years: if you rewrote it from scratch now, what would you change? And Linus' answer was very interesting for me - and after reading it, I would answer your question (tongue in cheek): "Never, because it seems that Linux developers were quite successful in starting all over again for quite some parts of the Linux kernel." I guess it's not really an answer to your question, but kind-of ;)
- kingsuper20 6y ago
  No doubt any replacement would have to be enough better that it's worth the cost (opportunity and otherwise) to both produce and switch to it. Perhaps security/privacy issues might drive a serious rehatching of commonly used software. It occurred to me that there's enough inertia at this point that you'll likely only see ground-up architecture and/or implementation when some sort of hardware substrate is produced that requires it. Until then, we are on the karmic wheel of cpus that drive os/language design that drive cpu design.
  - sagarm 6y ago
    Google is building a new OS called Fuchsia, with no new hardware to drive it was far as I know.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Koshkin 6y ago
Well, even now Linux is not the only choice (in theory, anyway). As far as desktop, Haiku does not look bad at all. On the server, a BSD is all you need.

julianna01k 6y ago

A very interesting interview. 70% of my YouTube subscriptions are channels with interviews of people from different fields. I transcribe the most interesting videos into text using https://audext.com/ https://audext.com/

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
You can also use vtt2txt.py[1] which is free, e.g. take the auto-generated subs from youtube and then convert them with vtt2txt.py: youtube-dl --skip-download --convert-subs vtt <video_url> python3 vtt2text.py some-video.en.vtt [1] https://gist.github.com/glasslion/b2fcad16bc8a9630dbd7a945ab5ebf5e https://gist.github.com/glasslion/b2fcad16bc8a9630dbd7a945ab...
Rompect 6y ago
*This is an ad.*

3pt14159 6y ago

I love how Linus gave so much credit to Junio and downplayed his own personal role in the project.

Koshkin 6y ago
He probably regrets not calling it JuniOS.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Wrong project.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Also, Torvalds didn't want to call Linux Linux initially (but didn't really complain when the name was pushed on him).
- jefurii 6y ago
  I read an interview where he says that he names all of his projects after himself.

bombcar 6y ago

[He] Started Linux 30 years ago, and git 15 years ago ... sounds like we're due another big project. Someone change the license on something Torvalds uses and piss him off!

TacticalCoder 6y ago
Wow: that is very early adoption! I'd say Linux, with Slackware, around 1994 (?). Git took me a bit longer for as I was a happy Mercurial user but once I saw the momentum shifting heavily towards Git I switched.
- qw3rty01 6y ago
  30 and 15 years was when Linus started writing each
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Yeah, updated to make that more clear - though I wasn't insanely far behind on Linux (and had I been a bit older I might have been closer to the beginning). During the source control wars I was firmly in the Bazaar camp, however - but it seems everything but git is now moribund.
xiphias2 6y ago
If he allows another language in Linux, there is nothing that could piss him off anymore.
- 1_player 6y ago
  I'd love a new C-inspired language (no, Rust is C++-inspired) made from a pragmatic developer like Torvalds. Zig comes very close IMO, but it's still too unstable to be under Linus' radar.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I think having a new production quality C-inspired language is just not practical anymore. There was a thread about improving C language with the auto keyword with a long and well thought out standardization process. After adding some of these features that are clearly missing, there won't be too much improvement possibility compared to C while keeping a C-like type system to warrant the huge amount of work to create a new language.

runawaybottle 6y ago

And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's. College can really lock you into one editor or another for a lifetime.

bombcar 6y ago
There's something fundamental about your first "keystroke shortcut" learning - I believe Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts long after 1-2-3 ceased being a force in the market.

vhold 6y ago

First thing I searched for is GCC and I'm really glad he emphasizes how important it was to the origins of Linux. It's historically under appreciated how critical GCC was at that time, how it had far far reaching impacts that changed the path of computing globally. GCC not only makes Linux possible, but it brought the other unixes closer together, which is instrumental to escaping the vendor lock of the various *nix vendors. That means by the time Linux is reliable enough for production, there is already a lot of cross-platform software to run on it.

bombcar 6y ago
People make fun of the GNU Hurd project, but GNU really did work on the toolset in nearly the best order possible; a compiler is fundamental and without it you have nothing. It took decades for LLVM to finally appear as a workable alternative; even the BSDs relied on GCC.

guenthert 6y ago

I'm sure that topic had been discussed to death long time ago, but I enjoyed reading about the original reasoning for picking the GPL as license for Linux as stated here in this interview.

udev 6y ago

When/where can we read the second part of the interview?

crescit_eundo 6y ago
From the article: "Check back next week for the second part, where Linus explores the lessons and insights gained from three decades at the helm of the Linux kernel."

ilamont 6y ago

Impressed that he sees communication as one of his primary responsibilities. I don't think this gets enough recognition at distributed organizations, whose members often take communications for granted or fail to recognize how powerful it can be as a mechanism for more effective everything. I was also struck by his comments about the preferred tool, email: Email really ends up being a wonderful tool, and we didn't rely on face-to-face meetings.