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Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work.

Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but the fact is that he has attained disproportionately less value than he's created. By rights he should be one of the wealthiest people in tech. He might have 150m but that's peanuts given what he's done. The wealth of the guy who made Instagram dwarfs that. The guy who made Whatsapp has a net worth of 8b.

Creation might be 90% perspiration as he says, but perspiration doesn't equal success, and success doesn't equal a career. Obviously everything isn't about money, and Torvald's legacy will be timeless. But if you want to ensure earnings, at some point it's a good idea to sell.

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You somehow make it unclear whether or not Linus not being a multi-billionaire is a good or a bad thing.

Are you saying that because he didn't try to monetize his code as much as he could have, it somehow makes his opinion less valuable?

The man created Linux AND git, it doesn't matter whether or not he's got billions. He's got something more important than that, a legacy.

> He's got something more important than that, a legacy.

Why is that important?

Linus Torvalds' work has been useful to me, and to you, and to many other people. That's surely more important than whether or not he is rich

?! Surely that completely depends on whether or not he'd like compensation for your convenience.

Well, if you're considering only what's important for him then yes. Otherwise no

In my opinion, a legacy like that of Linus means that he's produced a piece of software that has positively impacted the lives of people.

It's important because he's actually delivered on the famous SV con-artist promise of "making the world a better place".

Not directly, as in curing diseases or revolutionizing energy production or consumption, but in ways that help people in developing countries access information due to falling costs of computers (Linux) and phones (Linux through Android) and people in business can thrive because of the diversity it brings to the table (versus the Microsoft quasi-monopoly we had before).

That's what I put under the umbrella term "legacy", something that has, in a way and ever so slightly, changed the world for the better.

Then again, we might say "it's just software", but in a software-centric world, I reckon it does matter.

Positively impacting lives is surely important.

That's besides the point. My point is that working without selling is not a viable strategy for 99% of people. Hell it barely worked for him in terms of earnings, and he's one of the most impactful people in tech history.

It's not besides THE point, it's besides YOUR point, big difference.

Suppose that what matters is to monetize your work. Then by that metric, Linus is immensely successful (personal worth of over 100 million dollars, which likely puts him in the high brackets).

Now suppose (like I do) that the metric that actually matters is sharing the result of your work so that others will build upon that and end up creating even greater things. Well, by that other metric, Linus is still a HUGE winner.

So we're basically both right (unless of course we're ready to discuss obvious falsehoods such as "Having 100 million dollars means it barely worked for you").

On your deathbed, are you going to regret not making more money? If your basic needs have been met and your children have been well educated and aren't starving, then the answer is probably no.

But many of us will regret not spending more time with our loved ones, or not leaving something of value behind, something we created.

The truth is many of us aren't doing this for the money, because let's be honest, most of us have an IQ over average and we could work in the finance industry, which is far more lucrative for making actual money. Or we could build a local business selling products or services for local needs, not "disrupting" anything in the process. Or we could end up in upper the management of big corporations, in safe and high paying positions, instead of doing the actual coding. Etc, etc.

We, the software developers, are creating, we've got the creator's virus. It's both a blessing and a curse.

Oh and if any recruiters are reading this, those of us with passion, experience and capacity for solving hard problems might be motivated by technologies or projects, but we aren't cheap or exploitable, so for as long as we are on the right side of the demand/supply curve if you're looking for cheap, then GTFO!

Nice romantic view but the fact is that 95% of people in the western world can't afford society's perceptions of "basic needs". I'd wager that most people you hear talking about innovation, outside of Websummit and so on, are living hand-to-mouth and very much need to sell their ideas.

Those people you're talking about should move outside of Silicon Valley.

There's a whole world out there where you can live quite a comfortable lifestyle for a half or even a third of your average SV monthly income.

Seriously, money is a matter of hygiene and if you're feeling the need for more, it's time to make a serious change, like to change city or profession, because startups are a lottery.

Well your pay is going to decline in accordance with the cost of living. I'm mainly talking about salaried jobs here, I don't know how profitable the average startup is (I'm guessing 'not very')

Yes, but the relation between the cost of living and monthly income is not directly proportional, especially in the software industry where remote work is possible. You would be making less, but if you're making one third of your SV income, the cost of living can be much lower than one third of SV.

I'm from Romania, having worked remotely for EU and US companies and I never left because here I can have a much better lifestyle, I have freedom of movement when needed and recruiters coming with proposals which include relocation are simply not competitive.

Seriously, Silicon Valley is extremely overpriced and IMO quite toxic as an environment to live and raise children. That's because it is a bubble of really smart and well paying engineers, scientists and business people that have created a highly competitive environment.

And if you suffer because of the bubble, the answer is not to fight your way to the top, because that doesn't solve the problem. No, if you don't like the bubble, the answer is to get out of it.

If you're alive, your basic needs are being met. What you do over and above that is a recreational activity. Though I see people all the time engaged in recreational activities that don't look like much fun at all.

Not sure if homeless people's or victims of abuse and exploitations' needs are being met. Some even think it's totally fine after acclimating. There are varying degrees of needs and if you approach it biologically then improving the lives of people suffering is simply participating in a "luxury" industry. Pretty sure the execs of Tiffany's and Louis Vuitton do not view themselves as fulfilling the same general needs of the world as UNICEF and other humanitarian non-profits.

This kind of reducto as absurditum is how we have people that think it's perfectly fine for unprecedented mass poverty in the US outside the Great Depression because people may have running water and TVs when most of the world doesn't. While true, it misses the spirit of the discussion and is a non-sequitur line of reasoning as a result.

> 95% of people in the western world can't afford society's perceptions of "basic needs"

You're saying 95% of people in the Western world can't afford food, shelter, clothing, education, transportation, healthcare and entertainment? That's awfully grim. It also doesn't really jibe with my experience of the Western world; you can get by fine on $50k/yr (median US household income) outside of expensive areas like SF Bay Area or NYC. If what you're saying is true then the rest of the world must be truly unlivable.

EDIT: I think something like 20% is closer to the mark.

I specifically said 'perception' of basic needs ;) I'm not talking Maslow's hierarchy here...society's perception of a basic need is to own a modest house, but that puts most people into debt for life. Well that's how I see it at least.

I understand, and I really wasn't going for bare necessities (that's why I threw transportation and entertainment in there). I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's something wrong with society's perceptions of what a "modest" house actually is.

To illustrate, the median house price in the US is around $250k. That's pretty much in line with the rule of thumb that your house should cost at most 5x your gross annual income. So it would seem (at a first approximation) that most houses in the US are affordable, in the strictest, 30-year-mortgage sense of the word, to most households (considering $50k to be the median household income). And a $250k house in most parts of the country is by no means "modest"; we're talking 1500-1800 sq. ft., 2-3 bedrooms, a yard etc. (again outside expensive areas). So if a median-earning household were to spring for a truly modest home (1-2 bedrooms, 1000-1300 sq ft, $100-150k range) it would actually be cheap relative to their income and they could pay it off in < 15 years.

Maybe I'm simplifying too much, or perhaps your experience is different. In which case, of course, we would have differing opinions on this matter.

It's just my opinion, but given the current values of the Western socienties, producing something that greatly improves your knowledge area or industry is perceived as a more noble goal than accumulating wealth. It can get you in a history book at least.

Also - it is possible that as a commercial product, Linux would not have had the same level of success as it does today.

It's not black and white, good or bad, that's the OP's point, it depends. If your goal is to accumulate wealth perhaps LT did it wrong, if your goal is to build something great then you should perhaps choose his route. Those goals may intersect and that's great, but that's not a necessary condition.

As a Scandinavian I'd like to think that the culture Linus was brought up in influences what he personally sees as "success". Considering he grew up under the belt of the Nordic model, he might consider success completely different from someone brought up in the US for example, where the American Dream™ has long been the status-quo where amount of money equals amount of success.

I'm sure Linus is living a very comfy, happy life - even though his Net Worth isn't greater than the guy who made Instagram.

I've always assumed this about him. Again, I admire him greatly and I don't think that money trumps everything. I used the Instagram and Whatsapp examples just to demonstrate Linus' almost ridiculous lack of work->earnings.

I mean if a world-renowned workaholic genius can't automatically generate a fair amount of wealth from decades of creating some of the most used and influential software in the world, what does that imply for the rest of us?

I don't think it is because he couldn't generate a fair amount of wealth from his work, but rather that he chose not to, and I believe that is what lead to the success of the project.

I also don't see him as a world-renowned genius (as you put it), because he isn't one and from what I've understood from watching his talks & reading the mailing list he himself does not want to be refered to as one either. I think that people should keep that in mind when they read articles about Linus, because most articles tries to portray him as some kind of higher form of being among the likes of Steve Jobs & Gabe Newell, which I believe is not the way he'd like to be perceived when you read a sentence he spoke.

Oh I see your point now, in that he chose not to. Yeah you're probably right.

Tech-world renowned I should've said. And he may not be a self-proclaimed genius but he has a level of talent which is surely rare, at least.

And its cool to hear you saying that. Because if you measure great software, and divides that by population, Nordic countries proves that their culture are the best one, to make great and influential technology (and let's not forget all the influential tech achievers working for US companies now).

And i think, a lot of that has to do with your culture.. people should take this kind of thing more into consideration, try to understand what the "secret ingredient", and try to replicate the things that work somewhere else.

> but the fact is that he has attained far less value than he's created.

This goes for an extremely large portion of humanity, probably > 99.99%.

Very few people manage to extract all of the value they created (and sometimes more), and most of those people are not the nicest ones.

Oh well absolutely, but Linus' value creation/wealth disparity is mindblowing. Again, I'm not suggesting that money is everything, and I'm sure that he'd say he doesn't care about money. But he's advocating an ethos which wouldn't work for most people, and which barely worked for him in terms of earnings.

> which barely worked for him in terms of earnings.

100M$+ or so? Barely? Where do I sign?

You could not spend > 10M$ on yourself and your direct dependents meaningfully in a lifetime.

Now think about the man who invented writing.

The truth about most SV billionnaires is that they captured far more latent value than they created. This ethos of building a fortune of absurd proportions can not work for most either.

Really? I would say that a large portion of people who live in a society extract more value from it than they put in. If you are just merely doing your job you are not making any extra value. I could work hard as a hunter-gatherer, or work hard programming, but either way I'm just doing my job. In the second case I'm just using the infrastructure that other people have set up to be able to live a much happier life by working just as hard (or even less hard).

> If you are just merely doing your job you are not making any extra value.

That's got to be the most ignorant comment on HN in a very long time. Really? Think for just two seconds: Do you think a person would be employed at all if they did not make more value than they took home (including taxes and all that)?

The whole reason our economy works at all is BECAUSE people make more value than they take home. If not for that there would be zero employment.

Well, there are some people who are not employed.

Who are kept alive by the taxes from those that are, so even there the excess value created is what makes the system work.

How about you think, for maybe 10 seconds or more? Even the most well designed machine needs cogs. Most people are just a cog in the machine. The cog doesn't add value, it just makes the machine work. But of course those cogs are still needed and therefore employed.

Entrepreneurs build the machines. Everyone else is just cogs or highly specialised components.

Try looking outside of your little bubble once in a while. Just for one day pay attention to what the vast majority of working people are actually doing.

Our society is premised on the vast majority of people not extracting all of the value they create. The difference between what people create and what they extract via wages is the source of profit, and is extracted by the capital-owning class. This is...basic economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Marxist...

No, it's extracted by the customer. Which all workers are in other contexts.

Linus Torvalds has an estimated net worth of $150m, I doubt he's worrying about where his next meal is coming from.

Where did you get that number from?

Funny because if he did a Bill Gates his creation would be so much less special.

You and "the instagram and whatsapp guys" simply use a different denominator for wealth than perhaps Linus, theregister readers, or many of us here.

You're talking first of all there about valuations (aka pie-in-the-sky) not cash-in-the-bank-or-matress anyway or other encumbered "assets" not money. These usually only get "converted" when in a mad rush to beat the avalanche of other "assets" seeking rapid conversion on a massive scale due to black swans, and then good luck converting those "billions" into (purchasing-power-equivalent, in-the-bank) billions.

> Obviously everything isn't about money, and Torvald's legacy will be timeless.

So why the heck bring it even up? =)

> So why the heck bring it even up? =)

Because he's saying shut up and work? But working doesn't just...work...

Well he didn't say "shut up and work to make a billion" =) whatsapp and instagram are .. cute, not major groundbreaking "innovations"

Torvalds didn't say that marketing and sales wasn't work. He said that crapping on about innovation isn't work, and that work is in the details. And the same is true in sales as well - who would you rather work for you in sales, the one who spends their time crapping on about how huge everything is going to be, or the one who spends their time pounding the pavement, making calls? The work is in the details in sales as well.

That's all very true, but the people you typically hear 'crapping on about innovation' are doing their job, and have more than likely put enormous effort into perfecting their documentation, presentations, delivery, pitching, market analysis etc etc.

Your good point is getting very unfairly down-voted by disagreers. Sure, he's set for life, but compared to his massive contribution to the industry, Linus seems to have left a lot of money on the table. I know--it's stupid to believe in the just-world, but it grinds my gears that in our world talkers tend to be rewarded orders of magnitude more than doers.

He is worth $150 million and has an annual salary of $10 million : http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/t...

I say he marketed himself well

I doubt both claims are true, especially the one about his annual salary. I would like to see a better source; I googled it, but the only other answer I found was that in 1999, he got some shares from Redhat worth of about $20 million.

Had he heavily monetized, Linux might not have happened at all in the current shape.

If you think money is important you aren't a hacker.

An ironic thing to say in a seed accelerator-owned website.

I think there's a sizable camp of HN members who just come here to read the various interesting tech articles, with no plans to join the cult of SV.

Money is a tool in a hacker's kit like any other. If you don't recognize the importance of useful tools you aren't a hacker ;)

A tool is not important. A tool is just a tool.

I'm assuming this is sarcasm, but in case anybody thinks this, just remember: money = freedom.

> money = freedom

That's a strange formula. Shouldn't there be some kind of saturation for freedom.

I think our viewpoints are so diametrically opposed that we each can't comprehend the possibility of the other being serious or well-informed.

I believe Linus claims to be an engineer, or maybe a manager nowadays. shrug Glad he has done well anyways.

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