Linus Torvalds on the Google vs Oracle verdict
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Oracle will throw marketing and lawyers around to hide as much of their failure as possible by threatening other vendors and any dissident opinion.
Oracle has a suitably large reality distortion field.
I'm really hoping he makes a Twitter account for his rant-I mean comments :D
I'd probably switch to it exclusively too if I could use it to export to Twitter and Facebook.
HN's own style guide has sound advice for how Linus might shorten his posts to under 140 characters.
1) It gives a lot of pleasure to respond with it to idiotic ideas.
2) It adds emphasis and a sense of proportions to the error, ie. it's not just a simple mistake, it is an idiotic mistake.
3) It (hopefully) shames the perpetrator of the idiotic idea into thinking twice before speaking.
It's not always appropriate, but a lot of times it is just the thing.
Linus works at Google?
I don't use it, but for social media you can use IFTTT:
If you follow the trending, a hugh number of trends are tech related and specific to Linux like #GIMP, #GDriveforlinux. A large number of G+ users seem to be geeks.
Mobile terms of service
By tapping 'Accept', you agree that Google will use your location in this product and accept the Mobile Terms of Service.
Edit:
After reading the terms and accept...
Using iPhone (nope I'm on iPad) download our app from the store, it's more fun. (no thanks)
Or continue with the standard site. (very small)
And, that last link goes to my home in Google+, not the Linus post.
I have to searh the post again in HN and tap.
The Linus words are funny but not for so much effort.
Revenue: US$ 35.6 billion (2011) Operating income: US$ 12.0 billion (2011) Net income: US$ 8.5 billion (2011)
Actually Oracle has done a lot with Java too but this latest thing just wow, at least the courts came out with a logical decision.
C/C++ doesn't seem to have done too badly since Bell labs stopped developing it!
I wouldn't be so sure about the C++ part ;)
a) Java customers tend to also use Oracle DB and Solaris, two other big Oracle products. Revenge on Google can't be worth giving up owning the full stack.
b) Google (perhaps with IBM and Red Hat) would be absolutely delighted to pick up Java development were Oracle to stop working on it; quite the opposite of what Oracle would hope to accomplish.
And, to be fair, he does intentionally say things in an over-the-top way to be funny, although such statements pretty much always have an element of truth.
I can see serious problems in the design and certification stages, but the marketing should be extremely easy.
The oddest thing is, as I read random lkml threads that interest me, it seems that Linus isn't a jerk immediately when people bring up stuff - even well hashed stuff. When he is wrong, he admits it, and seems reasonable about patches that aren't perfect/up to snuff, particularly from newer devs who are trying to do well. It's when the threads go on and on that it seems to degrade. (or when a topic that is famous for being a no-go is brought up... but i think it's fair to at least understand the thing you are trying to contribute to, particularly as well documented as linux).
Now here is him on an un-related issue apologising: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/21/230
For linus the github 'discussion' was an everyday thing. He speaks his mind and will apologise if he is wrong, such is the order of the day on the kernel mailing list.
In England when you say "Hello! How are you?" the answer is almost always "Very well thanks, how about you?", even if the person is not very well. This is considered polite. Other countries find this odd, and consider it lying.
People don't really want to know the details how you feel, it is just a way of greeting.
I was quite concerned (i.e. British for "terrified") until they gave me the pre-med Valium.
And yes, it did sting a bit.
It's less of someone being a jerk, and more of them being direct and to the point, coupled with a large degree of cynicism.
This attitude is not true of all OS developers, though. There are lots who are really even-tempered. But they are also very focused and not necessarily willing to accomodate everyone with a "bright idea".
While it might make the learning curve a bit steeper for mere mortals, I actually believe this is what makes a better OS.
I would be interested to see a "Linux" where Torvalds also controlled the userland. What would it be like?
Quicker, shorter, terser sounds good to me, whatever it is.
Or maybe you mean if he wrote his own shell?
The parent post said that Linus' writing was extremely terse and "to the point" and what would happen if Linux wrote the userspace.
The joke was that Unix's typical user interface, the shell, isn't exactly overflowing with unecessary verbose "fluff"
As for your use of find, I rarely ever use find for anything more than printing a recursive dir listing. I always gravitate toward different approaches for doing the other things it can do. Syntax is probably one of the reasons. I'm just not motivated to learn find's idiosyncratic syntax. Why not just make find use C-like syntax as does awk? If I was to redesign UNIX, every utility would, where possible, use a C-like syntax. Because then the user would naturally be learning a little bit about C right from the start.
Have you ever tried the k language?
If you like terse, it is a pleasure to use.
Generally, I like sed as an example of a terse, compact language (and sed seems a logical extension of ed, not something wildly and arbitrarily different), except when it's necessary to use -e to separate commands. Being able to use semicolons to separate commands allows more density.
I have always posited the verbosity (and the complexity) of the shell comes from the need for quoting and escaping. If you could avoid those two necessities, the command line could be more concise, and readable.
Dunno about sed - once I wrote a Brainfuck interpreter in it for fun, but I see it as a Turing tarpit - for things more complicated than "/a/s/a/b/" I prefer awk, though I wish awk had the succinct "s/a/b/", and I wish either of them had a quick way to extract a capture group from a match. (vi was a teenager when I was born, so I personally don't care about adhering to ed.)
I've never tried any APL-like languages and am therefore somewhat scared of them... but most of the programs I write outside of the interactive shell are non-throwaway and/or the kind of glue code that uses lots of random system functions, which decreases the value of extreme terseness. (But I prefer anything over Java and dislike the inflexibility of languages without macros, so perhaps it's only logical for me to go ahead and learn an array language.)
Java makes me cringe. But my understanding is Java programmers use IDE's with autocomplete. They don't do much typing.
As for your pipe comment, are you a whiz with passing file descriptors? What do you think about chaining programs together in this way? Would that solve your pipe needs?
Maybe you could accomplish what you want using lex? The general paradigm is pattern-action, just like awk. Lots of flexibility in what you can create. You could create your own interpreter.
I like writing simple filters. I guess I have succombed to the UNIX voodoo. I think of everything as a stream of text.
I'd be interested to take a crack at your "capture group" problem, if you can give me an example of what it looks like.
/the number is ([0-9]+)/ { print $1; }
perl -pe 'print "$1\n" if /the number is ([0-9]+)/'
Not sure what you mean about lex; if I decide to go ahead and write my ideal shell I could use it, but that's A Project, a large part of which is designing the syntax and deciding what commands to implement. And I'm lazy. :)
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.
> "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 +
> 1 is 2, not 3."
It seems logical to me that abuse isn't necessary; but logic is a poor substitute for actual understanding.
In reality I think he is just direct and says exactly what he means.
I get Torvalds is a genius, but with the ending line in his G+ post, "Sometimes I really wish I wasn't always right. It's a curse, I tell you." it sounds like all of those caffeine fuelled late nights have deprived him of vital nutrients, he's nuts nowadays.
I realise everything I just said is a rant, I'm a hypocrite at times.
Side note: anyone else think Linus looks a bit like Nicholas Cage in his Google Plus profile picture?
Anyway, at least he earned his right to rant about git and linux, I mean, he sort of created them. And regarding Google v Oracle, he is a stakeholder in the verdict - if APIs are copyrightable, there will be people filing suits against linux on the way out of the courtroom.
What did you do to earn your right to rant?
If he's project manager for Linux, why was he surprised that that the Linux core is getting bloated? If he's a project manager, shouldn't he be managing the team to unbloat the operating system? I'd hardly call flaming your own team and operating system a contribution. Nothing about this makes me angry, Linus is a genius and he knows it which is why it frustrates me to see a guy like him resort to sometimes school yard words and ways of dealing with things.
Linux itself has already been through what Google has, remember the whole Microsoft debacle? Regardless of the verdict, pretty much every software company that has felt threatened by Linux I'm sure has tried some kind of legal action in some way, shape or form.
I earned my right to rant the day I got an internet connection, which was a very long time ago.
To put it another way, discouraging geeks from ranting about what they think, can seriously damage the quality of your codebase.
Also, please note that Linus' way of interacting with other people online is, at least according to him, a calculated strategy which is part of his management style. For more details on this, it's instructive to read over his brief and entertaining (to me, anyway) document on kernel management style. [1] Here, he says revealingly that he doesn't think it's possible to be polite all the time, so it's better to try to criticize everyone equally "so evenly that nobody really ends up feeling like they get unfairly targeted. Make it inventive enough, and they might even be amused." He also says that politeness usually masks honesty, and that he doesn't think anybody is likely to trust you if you spend a lot of time being polite.
I think a lot of this has to do with his character, but it's worth noting that he is not oblivious to the way he comes off. He believes he's come up with an effective strategy for managing the incredibly large and important project he's in charge of, and it's hard to argue that it hasn't had some spectacular results. Even if you disagree with how he approaches it - and I emphatically would not approach any management job the way he does - you have to admit that he's conscious of what he's doing and he believes it has a purpose.
Hardly. Even just talking about publicly-available open source projects, consider e.g. FreeBSD.
So, what you're saying is that he shouldn't be allowed to rant. Gotcha.
It's pretty unprofessional for a guy of his
stature and influence to go on these ranting tirades
Professionals are people that provide a service in exchange for getting paid, versus amateurs (in the original meaning) that are people providing a service just for the thrills of doing it. Money is not the differentiator here btw, as amateurs are getting paid if what they do provides value to people. The difference is that of the primary purpose - professionals work for the paycheck, amateurs work regardless of that paycheck.
And the word "unprofessional" is used to refer to behavior that would lead to the absence of that paycheck. For instance, if you walked into a grocery store to buy some bacon and the seller's bad behavior would drive you away ... that's unprofessional and it is discouraged because it hurts the business, as it loses money.
In this particular case, Linux is widely popular and is getting even more so every day, in usage and in contributions. Linus not only has been doing this for the fun of it, but his driving of the project has been extremely effective as there is no other open-source project that scaled so well.
So he's not a professional. Who cares when he has done such a fantastic job?
The definition of operating system turns out to be pretty loose. The MS antitrust case had a huge side argument related to this topic (what counts as an operating system and what doesnt). Arguments range from some subset of kernel functionality all the way up to every application provided by the vendor. It is essentially one of those "how many grains of sand constitute a pile of sand" debates. Strong arguments can be made that an operating system is simply a kernel with a statically linked userland program launched at boot time (this is actually provided within linux).
The bigger question is: what does this pedantic nitpick have to do with the broader discussion? Does it change anything I said in a way that undermines the point?