In January Linus Torvalds was interviewed by Jim Zemlin for the inaugural podcast of the Linux Foundation, for which both Linus and Jim now work. Here are a few excerpts from a transcript of their dialog, organized under headings that highlight what's changed, what hasn't, and what never will as along as Linus is leading Linux.
- Doe Searls
Code rules.
I have a policy that he who does the code gets to decide... But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is actual code and the technology itself and the people who are not willing to step up and write that code, they can comment on it and they can say it should be done this way or that way or they won’t, but in the end their voice doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is code.
Corporations don't.
...it doesn’t matter at all who you work for pretty much because nobody really cares.
...if you’re in a tech company and you have interest in something like the Linux kernel, the reason you have interest in the Linux kernel probably has something to do with the kind of people you have working for you.
I think most companies have slowly started to learn...
We have our differences.
... one misleading thing is thinking that people kind of share ideals and goals and that’s not true. It’s quite often the case that people have completely different goals; you have commercial vendors who have their very clear commercial goals and you have individuals that in the open source, so-called community, you often find individuals who really don’t like commercial entities, especially not the big ones. So, quite often the goals are very different.
Like Yoda said.
Trust either comes or it does not come and it largely depends on your actions.
... it used to be a huge issues where companies kind of were talking about “How do we interact with the community?”
...when the real answer always ends up being you don’t interact with the community, you just act as a member of this non-existent community.
...you don’t interact with it, you are part of it.
Looks matter.
I think the thing that more people worry about is actually interfaces.
It makes more a difference that the way you connect to a mobile phone is different from the way you connect to a desktop. You have a very limited keyboard, you have touch screen issues, you have a very small screen and I think the bigger issues tend to be in things like the UI interfaces.
Continue forgetting ABIs.
The lack of an ABI is two-fold: one is we really, really, really don’t want one. Every single time people ask for a stable ABI, the main reason for wanting a stable ABI is they want to have their binary drivers and they don’t want to give out source and they ... certainly don’t want to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel.
And that, in turn, means that all the people who actually do all the kernel work and maintain the kernel are basically unable to work with that piece of hardware and that vendor because if there’s any bugs whatsoever, we can’t fix them.
So, all the commercial vendors -- even the ones who used to accept binary drivers -- have moved or are moving away from wanting to have anything at all to do with binary drivers because they’re completely unmaintainable.
...other projects... have binary interfaces for one reason or another -- quite often because of commercial reasons --and that just means that they cannot fix their fundamental design.
The verities still are.
You need to have the code out there, not because of any social issues, but simply because you don’t know who’s going to be the one who has to fix it.
Vendor suckage may vary.
There are certainly specific vendors who end up having more problems than others. In fact, sometimes the same vendor may be very good in one area and very bad in another area.
Broadcom is an example of this. They are -- they have actually been fairly good when it comes to high-end gigabit network devices, wired network devices, but ... when it comes to wireless networks and other more consumer devices, they’ve been completely unable or unwilling to help us at all.
Practical vs. Perfect.
I’m fairly pragmatic, so I don’t care, per se, about one particular license or another. I want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3.
... the GPL Version 3 reflects the FSF’s goals and the GPL Version 2 pretty closely matches what I think a license should do and so right now Version 2 is where the kernel is.
Could there be something that happens to change that? Maybe.
...I cannot change the license on my own anymore. I mean, because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I’m not just, I think, ethically bound by those people’s choices. I am also actually legally bound.
It's still fun.
"...t’s just a lot of fun working with people; even though, I mean, I sit in my basement all day long and actually don’t meet anybody at all, but what I do is essentially communicate and it is very social..."
"what drives, motivates me is the fun part. I mean, part of being fun is that it should be difficult enough to not be trivial. So, fun doesn’t mean that it’s frivolous; it just means it’s interesting and exciting."
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