Or did he make it happen?
Would we be using something else today? Maybe GNUHerd would have received much greater attention, or BeOS would have been open sourced?
It depends on what you think of as great, but the man has developed two of the biggest software items in the world. One that runs the entire internet, and one that runs most software development.
Just about everything, ever, that any given person has done, would have been done by someone else. Sure we'd be on bsd. Or we'd be using subversion or mercurial. Without Einstein, the same truths about physics exist and would eventually be discovered.
I don't know how you define great, But in terms of good for society, and breadth of impact, I have trouble imagining anyone who's done more in recent times
He's an outspoken detractor of subversion [1], and after bitkeeper went pear-shaped [2], two projects sprang into being around the same time, solving the problem: Git, and Mercurial [3]. Whichever you think is better, when Torvalds converged on git as the choice for the kernel, the rest of the world could but follow.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial
From what I’ve read from his own writings he has faults, but he certainly moved the world forwards more than most people that have existed.
Just think - every software engineer’s resume worth anything mentions Linux and Git. Pretty incredible.
Should I mention those? I've always viewed that in the same vein as bragging about wpm in MS Word or something --- nearly everyone applying is good enough, and the rest can learn, so why waste precious page space on that over other more important information?
Also, not everyone knows git, or Linux.
If you're applying for a job that says you need experience with word, the put word on there
This is noise on a resume, in my opinion. I'm going to be assuming familiarity with these in most circumstances.
I recognize that different markets have different tolerance for nonsense on resumes, though: I've never heard of anyone in Europe adding extra-curriculars and things like "Eagle Scout" (or analogs of it) on resumes, and it'd be almost embarrassing interviewing someone who did.
His biggest contribution is actually in maintaining and growing his project into the huge thing it has become today. What would have stopped the continued fragmentation in the BSDs had they carried the day? Yes, Linux distributions are quite fragmented, but most of them run the same kernel (now-defunct mkLinux ca. 2002 aside).
Linux's "killer feature" for adoption may just have been the copyleft license. If device manufacturers had delivered today's generations of single-board computers, networked cameras, Android phones, and who-knows-what else on a permissively-licensed OS like BSD, each of these device trees would have had no mandate to make source available - and as such, I'd bet that any one entity (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc.) maintaining a device tree wouldn't have seen fit to open-source their "trade secrets" in the ARM ecosystem. Which, I'd also bet, would have led to fewer manufacturers adopting noncommercial BSD to begin with, as the "core" distribution would have been less ready to take on new platforms.
I know the "public image" is one of a shouty twat hurling insults and giving the finger, but that's just part of is style (previous comment: [1]). Overall, he seems quite pleasant and reasonable: someone you can disagree with, and who isn't afraid to say "okay, that's fair, I changed my mind". The general attitude is one of pragmatism, which is not the case for all (high-profile) maintainers out there.
Linux also always had comparatively low barriers of entry to get stuff merged; it's a bit higher now (quite a lot actually), but during the 90s and 00s there was some disdain from BSD folk towards Linux as "anything will get merged". This was not a completely unfair criticism; I mean, we're still stuck with things like ALSA today right? It also allowed Linux to grow much faster however; getting something merged to BSD involved a lot more review/effort. It's a trade-off.
Stability and "we never break userland" is another important piece, again, driven by Linus.
Also, the FreeBSD 5 release was kind of bad. They changed a lot of internals, and it was far less stable than FreeBSD 4. I never had any problems on 4, but 5 had an alarming number of freezes and the like. This was mostly fixed in FreeBSD 6, but it turned a lot of people off.
Torvalds in 1993; 386BSD was released in March 1992, a few months after Linux's first Sept. 1991 release.
Another problem that plagued the BSDs throughout the 90s is the whole AT&T lawsuit, which eventually turned out to be about a few header files or something :-/
2004: Ubuntu initial release.
2005: Maemo (Linux kernel) appeared in Nokia.
2007: iPhone (also unix kernel) appeared and Nokia (prior incumbent) peaked.
2008: Android (Linux kernel) appeared.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Which, to be explicit, I think he's earned. As have the hundreds of others who have worked to make "free Unix" into "ubiquitous Unix," who for various reasons will never get the recognition they deserve.
I think he does not get enough recognition from the big tech companies. He has saved them billions in costs. I would even say that some of the giants might not have even been able to start without his contribution to IT. I hope they start to realize that and make a point of saying so.
On the other hand, if you’re stingy enough to say that someone can’t be a Great Man of History unless you can definitely show that no one else in their place would have done the same thing, then I think some people have a stronger case than him. For instance, to my understanding, Winston Churchill was notorious prior to WWII for being an incorrigible warmonger who wasn’t willing to be “reasonable” about Nazi Germany. I think it’s likely that without him, whoever else was PM would have sued for peace after the fall of France. After all, you could name most of the people who probably would have been PM at the time, and as I recall, most of them did want to sue for peace at that time. I don’t want to get into a tangential debate about Churchill here—“Great Man of History” refers to magnitude of impact and not moral goodness. My point is, Churchill is the kind of person you point to as strong evidence for the theory of Great Men of History in the first place. Linus doesn’t have that strong of a case.
It's a bit of a challenge to take him out of historical context and ignore the rest of the Unix pantheon, RMS, Tanenbaum, and even Microsoft as the "Bond villain" that made it all happen.
Torvalds is an atom that looms large in a substantial chemical reaction.
GNUHerd is interesting in this context, because it highlights the strongest reason to regard Linus as "great": leadership.
Technical excellence is necessary, but not sufficient. The reaction requires a catalyst to complete.
So, if one deems it important to work the definition of "great" to include Linus, then, sure.
Torvalds deserves a lot of credit, but he is not necessarily a linchpin of FOSS computing.
Really depends on how many of these awards you’re handing out. My guess is of all the people in the world who have been born in the past century, he’d be “ranked” somewhere in the ones-of-millions? Maybe if you’re being super generous you could make a case for him in the hundreds-of-thousands?
Sure, in a century there are lots of people making contributions positive enough to make a similar impact. Maybe a few thousand, not hundreds of thousands or millions.
My estimate was based on the facts that the world is a big place, 100 years is a long time, and that people on HN are likely to GREATLY overvalue the contribution of a technologist.
In this context, what is the thing Linus Torvalds created? The... server?
But regardless, it doesn't make Torvalds of particular historical note. Important in a specific narrow field, sure. Of general historical importance, no.