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Interview: Linus Torvalds – I don't read code any more

• sophiabatka464 14y ago
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• Intermediate 14y ago
  I don't read interviews with Linus Torvalds anymore. He's a harsh and selfish person and seems like his number one hobby is not software development, but swearing at people.
  • thaumaturgy 14y ago
    You can learn something from anyone, even someone you disagree with.
  • jlgreco 14y ago
    You would be a fool to think that "What Linus gets to the front-page of HN for" is a representative sample of what he does.
  • ghshephard 14y ago
    "He's a harsh and selfish person" Harsh, perhaps (a function of his brutal honesty). But, I don't think you would find more than 1 out of 10 people who would agree with you that he's selfish. He did license the linux kernel via the GPL, and, he's dedicated pretty much his entire software to writing software that you can freely copy, modify, and distribute.
    • wyclif 14y ago
      Agreed. Of course, "harsh" is a relative term. But I think if most programmers and devs could see all of what Linus has put up with over the years on the LKML spread before them, they'd quickly reassess the meaning of "patience."
    • pavanky 14y ago
      May be intermediate is confusing stubborn for selfish ?
    • dnc 14y ago
      Here is what Linus Torvalds said on the topic in the other interview: "In many ways, I actually think the real idea of open source is for it to allow everybody to be "selfish", not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good. In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place". No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons." Link to the whole interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231 .
      • ghshephard 14y ago
        Notice that he uses the word, "Selfish" in quotes to make it clear that he's not using the word in the way we commonly define it. There's a very large difference between Linus's definition of "Selfish" (Which is basically people scratching their own itch, serving their own need) - and societies definition of selfish, "MW Def: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others" To some degree, all human behavior is "selfish" - we're all driven to do those things that bring us pleasure. The question is, in doing so, do we do so exclusively, and without regard for others. Traditionally, when we use "selfish" in the pejorative, that's the differentiator in how we use the word and Linus does. The genius of the GPL, of course, is that it aligns ones own self interest with those of a greater community. You can use the software as much as you want, just as long as you contribute back your changes to others. An enforced quid-pro-quo, if you will. I absolutely understand the argument that Linus is making, and I agree with him - that, long term, people need to be driven by the need to satisfy some personal need, not some greater community good. But suggesting that contributing software to the GPL is selfish is using language in the same way that suggesting affirmative action is racist. This is only true if we stretch the definitions of the words selfish and racist.
  • z3phyr 14y ago
    Linus is like a large coconut. Harsh looking from outside but gentle inside.
    • debacle 14y ago
      And delicious.
• wyclif 14y ago
  Oh, how I wish h-online would get that spreading an interview like this over four pages, just so they can grab more page impressions for the ads, isn't cool.
  • Luyt 14y ago
    Worse, they have animated GIFs in their ads in the right column. Totally detracts from reading.
  • curiousdannii 14y ago
    Print view: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Linus-Torvalds-I-don-t-read-code-any-more-1748462.html?view=print http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Linus-Torval...
• wisty 14y ago
  Deceptive title. tl;dr: Linus doesn't read kernel patches anymore, because subsytem maintainers do and just send him a summary. He's been working with them for about 10 years, so he trusts them. Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person.
  • dkroy 14y ago
    Okay, I should have read your post, we wrote the same thing...
  • derleth 14y ago
    > Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person. tl;dr for your tl;dr: Linus Torvalds is, in fact, a good manager.
    • est 14y ago
      So does this makes GIT an ERP system, for geeks with code?
      • ako 14y ago
        More like MS-project/MS-excel for geeks...
      • arethuza 14y ago
        I would say no unless financial transactions became an integral part of git - which isn't exactly a pleasant thought.
        • sirclueless 14y ago
          I like it: sign off on commits with SHAs of bitcoin transactions to the original developer. "Linus Torvalds gave SirClueless $10.00 for fixing issue #12073"
          • 14y ago
• shadyabhi 14y ago
  On a different node, I am disappointed that kernel developers haven't been able to solve this bug https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48721 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48721 since last 2 months. I am an avid linux fan but this drives me crazy.
  • Tmmrn 14y ago
    Do you boot with some power saving parameters like i915.rc6=7? If so, remove ALL of them and try again. Is that the HM65 chipset in that notebook? I have a Ivy Bridge CPU on the HM77 chipset and I had initially some problems with the scaling not working correctly but after a few reboots cpupower has worked without ever having a problem anymore...
    • shadyabhi 14y ago
      http://sprunge.us/TEPU http://sprunge.us/TEPU is my hardware and this bug is produced only on random reboots/resumes. Earlier, I had i915.rc6=7 in my kernel parameter, but I have removed it now. I rebooted and no issues but as I said, this issue happens on random reboots/suspend-resumes so I can never be sure.
      • Tmmrn 14y ago
        I have googled a bit about these or similar issues and there are some other maybe or maybe not related bugs in the kernel bugzilla. One was about the GPU randomly not entering the low power states and there a developer commented how many of those power saving parameters are disabled for a good reason and that you shouldn't even report bugs when you have nondefault settings. There are still a lot of weird bugs for example i915.rc6=1 would produce the problem with the GPU not even entering the (lower) power states that the default settings would.
• dkroy 14y ago
  Very very clever title, this is an example of context giving a different meaning. He still reads code, just not from his trusted network of kernel developers since he has worked with them so long, and it has already gone through a few layers of people. He also doesn't want to shoot down all of their hard work.
• zanny 14y ago
  I want to pull out a quote I really like: > Now people are taking adding a USB device for granted, but realistically that did not use to be the case. That whole being able to hotplug devices, we've had all these fundamental infrastructure changes that we've had to keep up with. Did anyone else notice this? In the last ~5 years, half a decade, we went from every major OS crashing on hot swaps or usb plugins or not recognizing devices or other crippling issues on hot swapping almost any hardware, to being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms. That is really amazing tech, and in this era of touch phones and web apps, we are still having huge leaps at the lowest levels of usability.
  • ghshephard 14y ago
    Well, except for the fact that my MacBook Air and MacBook Pro crash (Kernel Fault, hard freeze, requires power cycle) on numerous USB devices - both FTDI VCP serial drivers, as well as whatever is driving the Keyspan Triplite Console box. This has been true on pretty much every release of OS X Lion 10.7. Every two-three months I drop in a new driver from the FTDI site, and upgrade to a new patch of Lion - but both devices continue to sporadically black-screen me. Every time I pull out a USB cable/Plug it it it's like I'm rolling dice. The FTDI drivers on Windows XP are pretty mature (I've never had a crash on that platform), and I think they're built into recent releases of the Linux kernel - and I've heard no complaints there (or experienced them myself)- so, perhaps this is actually proving your point somewhat. We still have a ways to go before we experience 5 9s reliability on USB Hot Plug though...
    • regomodo 14y ago
      They've been there since forever in Linux.
    • wrl 14y ago
      For what it's worth, we run into these FTDI panics with Monome devices all the time. I've called FTDI personally to discuss this with them (iirc it was about a year ago, and I'd been sending them panic reports for a solid 8 months before that) and they just don't seem to care. No problems on Windows, and yes, the ftdi_sio module has been a part of the Linux source tree for quite some time (even OpenBSD has an FTDI driver).
• bravoyankee 14y ago
  If I was Linus I'd be miffed about the title and the prominence of the quote. It's badly taken out of context and it's a betrayal of trust. I felt kind of ripped off too when I got to that part. Again, it betrays the trust of Linus, who gave his time to do the interview, and the reader, who gave of their time to read it.
• reedlaw 14y ago
  If Linus doesn't read code (I know that's an exaggeration--he has trusted subordinates who do) and there are ~1000 people contributing code changes, I'm curious about who actually ensures that no one sneaks in a backdoor to the kernel. I mean if somehow something bad like that got passed on through the hierarchy all the way past Linus, would Distros just pass it on to users, or are there some other safeguards in place?
  • bryanlarsen 14y ago
    Every commit in the linux kernel contains at least one signed-off-by indicating just who has signed off on the patch, so your question of "who" can be answered fairly easily.
• utefan001 14y ago
  "When I was twenty I liked doing device drivers. If I never have to do a single device driver in my life again, I will be happy. Some kind of headaches I can do without." Linus Torvalds
• 16s 14y ago
  "Google has worked more on the kernel side, they've done their own filesystems." What custom filesystem is he referring to? Does anyone know?
  • cdawzrd 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System
    • 16s 14y ago
      GFS is user space, not kernel space.
• fotoflo 14y ago
  super interesting. thanks.