I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works. by Linus Torvalds

I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.

Linus Torvalds

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Categorized in : Persons Economy Pragmatic

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

guarding secret people

The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around "who can make changes." BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.

issues going-away giving

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

errors mistake thinking

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly. by Linus Torvalds

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

linux economy paid

I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.

answers mean thinking

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

simple use helping

I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene.

linux worried scene

The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code. You think v2 or later is the default. It's not. The _default_ is to not allow conversion. Conversion isn't going to happen.

keys people thinking

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money. As such, I'm not very likely to make the same kind of money that Bill made.

men mean thinking

There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious.

technology order people

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.

air sports moving

I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.

math writing believe

I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.

operating-systems linux worry

I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.

different intellectual thinking

My name is Linus, and I am your God. by Linus Torvalds

My name is Linus, and I am your God.

It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.

sides worry people

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at... by Linus Torvalds

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot

different writing world

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

corporations patents abuse

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs. by Linus Torvalds

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

program writing people

The fame and reputation part came later, and never was much of a motivator, although it did enable me to work without feeling guilty about neglecting my studies.

reputation study feelings