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Linus on Linux: Linus Torvalds Interview

Submitted by srlinuxx on Thursday 23rd of April 2009 09:32:50 AM Filed under
Linux
Interviews

In this interview Torvalds looks back on the operating system he created, the impact of new hardware, and the ubiquitous OS on everything from cellphones to desktops to supercomputers.

You’ve been doing Linux for about 18 years now. That’s not a long time by the standards of academic research, but it is a long time by the standards of the software industry. Many of the core contributors have stuck with Linux even as the industry has changed and they have changed employers. Is it good for the project to have the same people able to stick with it? Do you plan to?

I don’t think it’s good for a project if it’s only the same people who stick with it, and I’d be very worried about Linux if we had too much of a “core long-term people” approach. But there really are a lot of developers who are fairly recent, and most importantly there’s a really long tail of lots of people who dip their toes into kernel development if only to send in a really small patch. Most of them will never do anything more, but some of them will eventually be major developers. And we need that.

At the same time, I think everybody is also happier with some stability. There’s actually a number of people who have been around for quite a long time. People like Ted Ts’o, who showed up very early on and is still involved and still commits code.

So it’s not an either-or—we want to have both. And yes, I’ll stick with it as long as I think I can do a good job and nobody better comes along (or put another way: “as long as I can subvert whoever is better to work with me” Wink

And by the way, talking about changing employers: one thing I think is very healthy is how kernel developers are kernel developers first, and work for some specific company second. Most of the people work for some commercial entity that obviously tends to have its own goals, but I think we’ve been very good at trusting the people as people, not just some “technical representative of the company” and making it clear to companies too.

The reason I bring that up is that I think that ends up being one of the strengths of open source - with neither the project nor the people being too tied to a particular company effort at any one time.

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