<i>"Torvalds released the Linux operating system from his college dorm room in Finland in 1991."</i><p>Apparently the reporter assumed that everyone who goes to college, lives in a dorm room. But in this case that was not true.
"It's weird that a person who can come off as a real grouch has managed to be such a supremely effective dictator."<p>It's weird that a writer at the level of Bloomberg would be so weirdly dogmatic about this. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing weird about capable people being attracted to a leader who is good at identifying actual problems and is grouchily intolerant of those actual problems attracting capable people. Nor anything weird about such a leader motivating the people who are attracted; nor anything weird about such a leader getting high performance out of the organization. Supposed examples are not exactly scarce in business, military, scientific, sports, and entertainment off the top of my head, and as far as I know they're mostly true, not misleading legends. In most cases I only know second-hand, and I could be mistaken or misled. But the most straightforward interpretation of the evidence seems to be that successful doesn't-suffer-fools-lightly leadership is a pretty common pattern in sharp results-oriented endeavours.<p>In contrast, it would make much more sense if a sentence like that in a profile ended with "...has managed to be such a supremely effective automobile salesman;" as far as I know retail sales is not full of examples of grouchy doesn't-suffer-fools-lightly successes. But managing sharply goal-oriented organizations? Who would think that's inconsistent with what's reported about Linus here?<p>Even the prima donna antipattern of being a loose cannon who is flakily grouchy can be somewhat consistent with success --- people will put up with irritating inefficient prima donna stuff if there are enough compensating advantages. But I don't think the article establishes that's what's going on, and as far as I know it's uncommon for knowledgeable people to think that's going on. Success always breeds some level of resentment, and some fraction of people will jump to unusual conclusions, and many thousands of knowledgeable people know of Linus, so I assume there are some knowledgeable people out there who believe that he's an unreasonable prima donna. But I can't think of any individual to nominate as particularly likely to believe this.
Trivia: In the video he pronounces the first syllable of his first name as <i>lie</i>; Wikepedia has an audio file [1] in which someone pronounces it as <i>lee.</i> Perhaps he uses the former to conform to expectations of American English speakers who are used to Linus Pauling and the Linus character in the <i>Peanuts</i> comic strip.<p>[1] <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Sv-Linus_Torvalds2.ogg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Sv-Linus...</a>
My main criticism of the linux ecosystem is this:<p>The many eyes theory is broken due to complexity and amount of code, and hence the primary way to the future is in reduction of both (loc and complexity thereof). At over 10 million loc these days, linux has become unweildy for even the most experienced kernel hacker to really understand. This is why I think microkernels like Minix 3 have a bright future as their development progresses. (Minix 3 has <15k loc)
There are some programmers on the planet that I just don't know how to they do the things they do: Linus Torvalds, Mike Pall (luajit), Edi Weitz (Common Lisp) and several others, but these were the ones I always remmember from my limited exposure to the unlimited world of operating systems, languages, environments and virtual machinery...
"Linux was once 10,000 lines of code and required part-time tending. It’s now 19 million lines of code, and changing it involves a complex hierarchy."<p>Just wondered: 19 MLOC all driver code included, right?
Dude is 45 years old and we are already planning for his death. In other industries he would just be hitting his stride. In this one we are getting fitted for diapers.
As an aside, how does Linus come across as a grouch? Like any other normal human being that expresses a range of emotions, he might have exhibited an imperfect control on his temper/tone. People are way too judgemental / thin skinned these days.
> Linus Torvalds is the creator and sole arbiter of the Linux operating system<p>Well, yeah, but the first rule of journalism is to know your audience and I'd bet if you asked the readers of Bloomberg to name a few operating systems they'd say "Windows, OSX, Android, Lin..Lin...Linux." How many would list things like Darwin or kFreeBSD?