The early "selfish" reasons to do Linux tended to be centred about just the pleasure of tinkering. That was why I did it - programming was my hobby - passion, really - and learning how to control the hardware was my own selfish goal. And it turned out that I was not all that alone in that. Big universities with computer science departments had people who were interested in the same kinds of things.
And most people like that may not be crazy enough to start writing their own operating system from scratch, but there were certainly people around who found this kind of tinkering with hardware interesting, and who were interested enough to start playing around with the system and making suggestions on improvements, and eventually even making those improvements themselves and sending them back to me.
And the copyright protected those kinds of people. If you're a person who is interested in operating systems, and you see this project that does this, you don't want to get involved if you feel like your contributions would be somehow "taken advantage of", but with the GPLv2 [licence], that simply was never an issue.
The fundamental property of the GPLv2 is a very simple "tit-for-tat" model: I'll give you my improvements, if you promise to give your improvements back. It's a fundamentally fair licence, and you don't have to worry about somebody else then coming along and taking advantage of your work.
And the thing that then seemed to surprise people, is that that notion of "fairness" actually scales very well. Sure, a lot of companies were initially fairly leery about a licence that they weren't all that used to, and sometimes doubly so because some portions of the free software camp had been very vocally anti-commercial and expected companies to overnight turn everything into free software.
But really, the whole "tit-for-tat" model isn't just fair on an individual scale, it's fair on a company scale, and it's fair on a global scale. Once people and companies got over their hang-ups - renaming it "open source" and just making it clear that this was not some kind of anti-commercial endeavour definitely helped - things just kind of exploded.
And the thing is, if your competition doesn't put in the same kind of effort that you do, then they can't reap the same kinds of rewards you can: if they don't contribute, they don't get to control the direction of the project, and they won't have the same kind of knowledge and understanding of it that you do.
So there really are big advantages to being actively involved - you can't just coast along on somebody else's work.
But as it becomes more complex is there a danger it become less accessible for new people to get involved? So the kernel has definitely grown more complex, and certain core areas in particular are things that a new developer should absolutely not expect to just come in and start messing around with. People get very nervous when somebody they don't see as having a solid track record starts sending patches to core - and complex - code like the VM subsystem.
So it's absolutely much harder to become a core developer today than it was 15 years ago. At the same time, I do think it's pretty easy to get into kernel development if you don't go for the most complex and central parts first. The fact that I do a kernel release roughly every three months, and each of those releases generally have over 1, people involved in it, says that we certainly aren't lacking for contributors.
You have previously mentioned that you can't check that all the code that gets submitted will work across all hardware - how big an issue is trust in an open source project like this? A way for Linux to become popular on the desktop? Whether this is Canonical's Ubuntu , or Red Hat's Fedora or Debian's system or a new joint effort is something that intelligent people will disagree until the end of the days.
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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W review: Low-cost single-board device gets a quad-core upgrade. He said:. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did.
But we did keep the attitude. One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring… I wish the gnome people had understood the real rules inside the kernel.
I, along with many other Linux users, have felt the same reason behind the not-so-successful state of the desktop Linux.
There are too many choices available when it comes to desktop Linux and this is overwhelming to the new users to the extent that they just avoid using it. What do you think? Looking ahead, Torvalds noted that old Linux kernel developers are sticking around, while new programmers are appearing. As for the new ones, Torvalds doesn't think they need to have a college degree in computer science or engineering. But, "it makes sense to go to college," he said.
Programming is something you can learn on the side. You learn other things at university. Hohndel chimed in, "I know fantastic developers who didn't get a computer science or electrical-engineering degree. Hohndel continued, "You can still drop out of HS and be a great programmer. A self-taught dentist? Also: Git: A cheat sheet TechRepublic. All that said, Torvalds concluded, "It's a huge advantage to get a college degree.
I tell my kids, 'Don't drop out of school. Torvalds also spoke about generally other open-source projects. He believes community managers can be useful for open-source projects that start within companies rather than from independent developers. He thinks, though, some corporate open-source projects are putting the cart before the horse by focusing on growing their communities rather than improving their code.
Torvalds also touched on many other subjects. For example, when it comes to quantum computing: "I'm a huge Unbeliever. I don't think it will ever happen. If I'm wrong, I'll be dead long before I'm proved wrong. I've been known to be wrong. On the other hand, he thinks artificial intelligence AI is finally on its way, in his view. Early AI was snake oil, but we know neural networks work. Looking ahead, Torvalds sees Linux and open-source software becoming ever more important.
With hardware no longer speeding up as Moore's Law finally comes to its end , software must improve to meet our demands for ever-more powerful programs.
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