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Comment by meterplech | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed with the list actually. It's hard to create something like this- in order to be interesting you have to pick people others would consider relevant.

There are only two picks that are obviously wrong: Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg. And, it's a testament to both of them that they succeeded in challenging circumstances.

And, they did a great job picking Ballmer and Torvald. Their explanation of why Torvald is included (open-source as a movement has out-grown just his brilliance) is very prescient.

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I consider Torvalds one of the big mistakes on the list. This predates the rise of git, which is more innovative (though possibly less revolutionary) than Linux.

I wouldn't even write him off today, though it's hard to imagine what else he could touch that could be as world altering as Linux and git.

Also, this was before Android, which is now the most important mobile OS. So, Torvalds' impact continues to resonate and grow. I agree with them that Linux has outgrown a single person...and so, they may have been somewhat right, had git not sprung almost fully formed from that massive brain of his.

My gut instinct to the inclusion of Torvalds was "No, that's totally wrong", but on further reflection I think it makes sense. Linux is much bigger than him now. The whole point of the list is "In the areas where these people are considered 'important', who could I totally piss off and not see too many negative ramifications?'" I just don't see Torvalds wielding the kind of power or influence to really make or break a person/business.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to besmirch Linus, I think he's pretty awesome. I'm just saying, after thinking about it some, I understand why he might be on this list.

And I don't know that I would call git innovative, per se. git wasn't the first dvcs, and it's not substantially better than some other systems (mercurial, for example). git's prevalence today is purely because it won the popularity contest, plain and simple (being Linus project certainly helped!). On top of that, while git may be a big deal for developers, git's importance to the world at large is tiny -- frankly I'd argue that github is more important than git itself.

Linux is influential not because of git or Linux themselves, but because he represents to a lot of people how to manage an open source project. And to a lesser but still very large degree, he represents how to manage ANY software project. So the management decisions he makes end up being copied across open & closed source projects around the world.

git's prevalence today is purely because it won the popularity contest, plain and simple

I don't believe that is at all plain and simple (or correct). I worked with many DVCS systems before git. git was obviously better, from the moment I first tinkered with it, and the more I understood of its internals the more obviously better it seemed. There's a reason that after years of DVCS fighting it out for turf and never really gaining any traction, git exploded onto the scene and took over a huge portion of projects. git got everything right...that's why it won the "popularity contest".

On top of that, while git may be a big deal for developers, git's importance to the world at large is tiny

Developers make the world as we know it today. And git is what developers use. github is awesome, but git is the engine to github's fancy automobile exterior.

And people buy automobiles, not engines.

This is a discussion about engines. Your comment is non sequitur.

It's the front end that the github people have created which is desirable. They could have created something very similar with Darcs or Mercurial and it would of been just as nice to use.

darcshub.com mercurialhub.com? Nah, github sounds cooler... extra points for shortness.

I take your mercurialhub and give you a hghub instead. Ooops, it's actually shorter than hghub.

github sounds cooler though, I take that. You can actually pronounce it.

The internal combustion engine changed the world. It did it by way of automobiles (and other powered machines), but the internal combustion engine, in and of itself, was required for any of that stuff to come into existence. Likewise, git is the engine for numerous things.

I'm not sure I understand how hackers can continually underestimate the impact of our own tools and technology. There are millions of developers using git today, and the ones who use git are the most important and influential developers in the world. Sometimes I wonder if nerds even realize how much impact they have on the "real world"....

It is the idea of the combustion engine, and the fact that it became technical possible to build them that changed the world. It's not any particular combustion engine, but the combustion engine industry as a whole.

Yes, the combustion engine is very important for a car, but it became a commodity.

Yes, DVCS changed the world. Git maybe more than others because of its popularity, but slowly I think they are becoming commodities. Github could function with any other DVCS and practically all major DVCS (git, mercurial, darcs, bazaar) are interoperable one with another, making the choice more personal than technological.

So did Linus have anything o do with it winning the popularity contest?

A here something about git that made it the foundation for github vs oth dvcs?

It seems like you are making the point unintentionally.

> Linux is much bigger than him now.

Linux was much bigger than him then as well. I'd agree with you that in my world github is more important than git, but in the Linux kernel development world, I believe git is what has allowed Linus to remain very involved, and manage a lot of the commits very actively without becoming a bottleneck.

In other words, I think it's git's invention that makes Linus a bad choice on this list, because that invention has allowed him to continue to maintain a lot of control/oversight over the Linux project.

It's ironic that considering Torvalds to be irrelevant in light of how "Linux has outgrown a single person" is in itself proof of his success. The reason Linux was so revolutionary was that it was built to be decentralized and extensible. I was impressed to see this acknowledged in a CNN article.

In the grand scheme of things Git is unimportant. It’s niche technology. Version control is always going to be that and that’s alright†. (This is not a dig at Git. Git is pretty much all it can be and wildly successful at that.)

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† Apple is currently trying to bring version control (imagine quotes around that if you will) to the masses and I’m fairly certain that others will follow. I’m not sure what, if any, influence Git can have there, I really don’t think it’s going to change much.

android would have happened with or without torvalds's continuing presence beyond 2006. that's the point the writer was trying to make.

Although it's obvious they were wrong about Hastings in hindsight, I can't disagree with their reasoning (I'm guessing this was before Netflix streaming). And if Netflix hadn't launched a streaming service, it's clear that Hastings would be a nobody.

But Hastings-led Netflix DID launch streaming so I'm not sure what your point is. They would have needed to predict that for some bizarre reason Netflix would not do the obvious thing and get into streaming.

I believe I had even read somewhere in an interview that the reason Netflix had "Net" in it was because of their long term plans to move towards streaming, not because users selected movies on a website. In other words, it sounded like the founders had originally planned to focus on a streaming service.

Clearly Hastings read this article in 2006, screamed at his assistant, "Holy shit dvds are going away?!" and started up the streaming project that saved Netflix's future the same weekend.

Well played Business 2.0 Magazine Staff. History may ridicule you but Reed Hastings has one month of free netflix streaming for each of you.

Well, that's kinda the point: in predicting Hastings wouldn't be relevant, they were predicting that Netflix would not notice the decline of the DVD (or at least not know what to do about it), and wouldn't start offering a streaming service. But in fact, Hastings did see this coming, and so they started a streaming service. So the article... swing and a miss.

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