Part 2 of Interview with Linus Torvalds | Hacker News Reader

Part 2 of Interview with Linus Torvalds

tag1consulting.com

69 pointsjeremy_a20 comments

One of the things I like most about interviews with Linus is that there are rarely any lofty ideas or ideological thinking. He seems like an extremely focus person, who avoids speaking to subjects that he knows little or nothing about (Something I suppose I could learn from).

It's nice to see someone in his position not trying to use it to bring about changes outside his area of expertise.

And whose expertise is politics?

What if there is no such thing as politics? It's an umbrella term for so many different things.

You mean that almost everything is political? That was my point.

I was wondering why we must celebrate those who only speak within their domain of expertise -- which is why so few scientists/engineers make their voices heard even when the science they create is being trampled on.

This is the focus of the excellent "Manufacturing Ignorance" documentary: https://www.zed.fr/en/tv/distribution/catalogue/programme/ma...

> why we must celebrate those who only speak within their domain of expertise

"Must celebrate" is too strong. But a good reason to recommend such people is that such people are easier for most listeners to recognize as reliable source of information in the domain. People who are vocal of their unrelated political opinions can be experts on the domain, but they are more polarizing and make people watch out or reject them.

Not the op, and I don't know if I agree with him, but a possible answer would be "Those who studies political science".

He seems to be the ultimate “no-nonsense, get it done” guy. And he has enough good taste to keep Linux and its community successful for 30 years. Very impressive.

I prefer Noam Chomsky thinking about this.

Political is a transversal subject and everybody should study and speak about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Part 1: https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969595

I do often wonder about the transition from maintainers such as Linus or Greg and how that might impact the kernel.

Is there a line of succession? Will Linus' standards be maintained? Is a "council" formed similar to Python?

For such mission critical software I really do hope there's a concrete plan in place...We are all human afterall...

It is a classic human political problem, succession of power.

Transitions from a monarchy often end in disaster, though it currently seems that the Linux developers would handle it better than the Python developers.

"Councils" mostly attract power hungry individuals and get a dictatorial touch. The usual corporations would try to get their representatives into such a council, which destroys the atmosphere because open source development is now like work: You have to submit to the council members in case you want to get hired at their employers.

If you don't, they'll intrigue against you and make your life difficult.

> Is there a line of succession?

His oldest child (the crown penguiness), Patricia, is next in line. It is expected that as part of the succession Linux will be renamed to Patricux.

> I do often wonder about the transition from maintainers such as Linus or Greg and how that might impact the kernel.

As mentioned in the article, he already went off in a month long sabbatical and everything remained mostly on rails. I'm guessing that first test has passed now.

When you think about it, it's impressive that Linux, as a project, "just works". Hundreds of people working together for 3 decades, to make computers work in some sort of "standard" way.

Linus did an impressive job leading this calmly and friendly for years without never acting like some sort of "big boss who knows what needs to be done".

> calmly and friendly for years

i mean, i don't know, maybe it's all just clickbait but i don't think that's his reputation

here's a short story about personal growth via arstechnica urls:

linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers(2013): <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus...>

linus-torvalds-on-why-he-isnt-nice-i-dont-care-about-you(2015): <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/linus...>

linus-torvalds-apologizes-for-years-of-being-a-jerk-takes-time-off-to-learn-empathy(2018): <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...>

I don't think it's "clickbait", but it is a very incomplete picture. A previous comment on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815088

If you look at the interviews, then he's usually fairly nuanced and just pragmatical. The "nVidia, fuck you" was pretty funny in context, but now Linus giving the finger is the image for many Ars stories on Linus shrug.

And even when he's being an asshole he's at least being a constructive asshole; I don't care much for the overly confrontational style either, but it's a lot better than people just being assholes, which is very common too.

I also don't think that every community needs to adopt the same communication style by the way. What is considered "professional" is quite different in the Netherlands than it is in the US with its weird hyper-aversion to "bad words" (e.g. a while ago I saw a police shooting where someone was literally being killed containing a content warning for ... "offensive language", and not the actual literal death of someone).

Probably a bad autocorrect, but I never knew Linus liked "scsi novels". Makes me think of scsi drives rising up against their oppressors. :-)

> [Linus] I think I spent a year reading the free or 99¢ kindle scsi and fantasy novels by random unknown authors with editing problems.

Interesting that Linus comes from a family of journalists!

(The same is true of Jon Corbet, who runs LWN)

It did seem to become useful as the job shifted again and again from coding to reviewing to maintaining and setting maintenance standards through communication.

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