Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systemssuch as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition...
NationalityFinnish
ProfessionEngineer
Date of Birth28 December 1969
CityHelsinki, Finland
CountryFinland
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.
Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do
The way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.
When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.
I never felt that the naming issue was all that important, but I was obviously wrong, judging by how many people felt. I tell people to call it just plain Linux and nothing more.
I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.
People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.
The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.
What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.
In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.
Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.