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For the 25th anniversary of the Linux Journal, Robert Young has interviewed Linus Torvalds again. Yes, it's the same Robert Young who is co-founder of the large multinational, Red Hat. This is a follow up interview to the one Robert Young, then a journal publisher, made with Linus Torvalds 25 years ago in Linux Journal. A lot has changed since 1994.
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25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds
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I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @11:27AM (13 children)
And a lot hasn't. Torvalds still acts like an asshole when he wants, without being held accountable. And we're still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop.
Don't get me wrong. Torvalds took the concept of Tanenbaum's minix and turned it into a useful - if rather invisible - foundation for a lot of today's technology. But letting that justify his treatment of people, and others adopting and sharing his attitudes, is one reason Linux and OSS has a reputation of assholes and fiefdoms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @01:43PM (1 child)
This is modded "troll", but it is truthful even if not welcomed honesty.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday April 05 2019, @02:28PM
I think it'll bounce back and forth a lot depending on who last read it, a Linus fanboy or a realist. I'm a long-time Linus user but I readily admit that the guy running the show has user interface bugs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @02:30PM (2 children)
Not being held accountable? That's some crazy talk. He's held to a very high degree of accountability. Just not with the priority list you want.
He is being held accountable for the technical quality of the kernel first and foremost, the standard for his non technical skills is not that high. Which is logical, as I don't really care that much about the warm cuddly feelings that went into the kernel, I care about its quality.
I am very happy this is the priority chosen, so is my employer and many many others.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:03PM
The quality of his work has nothing to do with his being an asshole (often on purpose). He is not held accountable for the way he treats people.
You purposefully missing the point explains why you like Torvalds' attitude towards people. You think being an ass is an asset, but you are mistaken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13 2019, @02:53AM
... recently.
It's a complete shitshow. Particularly if you try and compile for a non-x86 arch, but the bleedout mess of drivers has turned it into a muck of unnecessary crap and mandatory dependencies that aren't actually required for custom kernel configs or specific cpu/motherboard arches.
As an example, lots of Intel SoC features are mandatory enabled now. This is invisible unless you spend the 3-8 hours to manually go through the kernel menuconfig (not make config, actual make menuconfig with the nice fancy menus.) 3 hours was a *MINIMUM* number to get just the basic drivers installed and turn off all the features I didn't want. In the older kernels, from 1.2 to early 2.4, almost all drivers were turned off by default and the minimum drivers were only the most generic or popular necessary for a complete system on that platform. Today there are fiberchannel, scsi, and other drivers enabled by default, along with a variety of random crap that slipped through the cracks of 'no drivers enabled by default' that Linus had ranted about right after his public CoC sucking event.
Linus hasn't been managing the Linux ship very well in a good 5-10 years, his delegates for the stable kernel trees have been allowing both regressions and badly implemented defaults and KConfig defaults in since at LEAST 2.4 (Sometime after .2x I believe.)
In addition to the problems with Linux itself, the gcc and glibc projects have both treated every other platform except x86 and x86_64 as second class citizens including leaving KNOWN regressions in during releases. Hell, gcc 6.5 has a C++ ABI regression that is WILLNOTFIX find the patch in the mailing list, rather than doing a stable point update, because 'hey everybody should just upgrade.' This actually ties in with the Linux attitude above since Linux became the focal point of both those projects, leading to neglect of features the corporate interests directing Linux development didn't need. And much like Microsoft they too benefit from the projects always being in a state of permanent disrepair, because that makes more people likely to need support contracts through them, rather than being able to roll or update components or packages themselves.
Linux has and continues to morph into an open source corporate mess akin to Microsoft Windows.
And meanwhile the hippyish original developers fall out of relevance and ability to elicit change as the corporate masters gain more and more legitimacy by coopting each and every foundation because the guys who love most of all to code either don't want to politic or are inept at it (No offense to RMS, but he hasn't been a good political face to the movement, even if he is often right.)
As it is today a major shift needs to happen if we want to maintain the relevance of an open source project that both respects the user and developers rights, as well as is secure, usable, and configurable for the technical user.
Gone are the days where compiling the kernel was an ordeal, but one that only required serious attention every few years as major updates were made. Today the major updates come in every minor version, and many of them are either incompetently managed or deceptively malicious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by progo on Friday April 05 2019, @02:37PM (2 children)
No. We're not. I go to meetups where people bring computers. I've seen Ubuntu and ChromeOS running on people's computers at meetings where the topics are accessibility, computer-based music, and software development. No one ogles at the Ubuntu laptops trying to figure out what it is.
Linux on the desktop is not dominant but it's a player. Those who want to use it are satisfied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:06PM (1 child)
Really? Who has a bigger market share:
* Linux on the desktop
* Microsoft on phones
I'm not knocking Linux (I use it on all of my servers and for all of my clients except for one who won't let go of the MS tweet). But a "player" it is not.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday April 05 2019, @04:14PM
Even Microsoft isn't able to sell you a phone with Windows on it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @03:33PM
Bullshit. He is absolutely held accountable, by the only group that matters: His peers. Most of whom seem to have no problem with it. If you have a problem with that, then join those peers and work for change. Don't twist the word accountable in to a pretzel to try and justify meddling because you don't approve of someone else's choices.
I mean, who else would hold someone accountable for their actions, other than the people directly interacting with them? If my plumber is an asshole, I fire his ass. I don't expect the City/State/Union to step in and force him to change his ways. If he's the only plumber in town, I either swallow my pride and get him back in, or I buy some tools and acquire the basics of the trade myself. Expecting someone to change their behavior just because -I- have a problem with it, is bullshit. There is no such thing as an 'attitude problem'. There is someone with an attitude, and someone with a problem. These are almost never the same person, though often you'll find it's two people with unrelated problems.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 05 2019, @04:54PM
Torvalds' attitude seems very similar to Steve Jobs'. The fact of the matter is that no cares about it, so long as they get results. It would be nice, if people could naturally learn to get along. In actuality, most people do, because it's no fun hanging out with someone who doesn't care about basic courtesy. There are some, who through whatever reason, never learn it and / or practice it. Linus seems to be that way, but maybe he's just overworked/stressed like the rest of us. Maybe, that's what he's like normally and he likes it. Who knows for sure? It would be nice, if he learned some manners, but at a certain point it's not about that. Some people don't respond to polite requests/feedback.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
Mmm, Linux would not be where it is now if Linus was an yes man.
Big projects need big egos, name me one big success where the leader is an yes person...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @08:48PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:29AM
oh shut the fuck up, you whiney bitch.