Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds [Full-length]

hey let me welcome leanness up here and this guy is going to help you out with with the thing and so um well while we're getting latencies microphone fixed by the way no slides and definitely everybody get your your phone switched off or or on silent and maybe I'm going to have to remember to do that in a minute myself just to get an idea of the demographics here could how many of you guys are students raise your hand like hi so most of you how many staff members faculty members at Auto ok great how many of you are developers in one way or the other excellent all right very good in how many of you are you there are currently entrepreneurs want to be entrepreneurs or looking at that as a possible career ok good we're getting there a nice one other nice thing that I can't test like this but I noticed looking at the signups that almost exactly 50% of the audiences had does not have a finish last name so finisher Swedish so I assume both of those so we have a very multinational crowd here and I think I think it's going to make for a nice set up so the general idea here would be is I'm going to kick things off with a couple questions in a and then I want to open it up very quickly to you guys and really encourage you to to to come up with something interesting to ask and I'm sure leanest will find find something interesting to answer i'll preempt him with one thing by the way is I think he'll tell you that he's not an entrepreneur corrected he's an engineer and I think it's a really interesting this whole the whole history of lis notes is really interesting as it relates not only to entrepreneurial stuff but basically to getting things done and building something big with high ambition so let me let me start off I did it I did a search on Google video of leanness Torvalds and I got one point four five million hits so I could and I went and watched it looked a few of those to figure out what are the questions that have been asked already and what might still be left to ask and I'm sure that I obviously don't hit all of it also uncovered a great page with leanest Torvalds quotes which is a treasure trove of interesting stuff really recommend you guys to take a look at leaving now so I'll pinpoint if no I'm not going to pinpoint those but but um I guess I guess my idea or the idea here would be to try to try to talk about some things that are interesting from our kind of burgeoning developer hacker community here that's also starting to look more and more at not necessarily going to big companies that may for example not be having as many jobs anymore I don't know I'm just just guessing but also for roles in in any kind of enterprise and government even so I think we really try to look at the idea of entrepreneurship is more deep down as something that's kind of driven went from within and so it's more of a way of thinking but I wanted to ask a little bit about the the beginning of Linux I mean I know uh been asked about it many times before but but what what kind of fascinated me is that that um you know a multi hundred probably multi hundred billion dollar ecosystem was born basically in a bedroom in a probably cold dark evening and in Helsinki maybe an overstatement but um but uh but could in the in the in the question kind of as this you've said often that it's it's a bit accidental that it can't became something so big yet we're of course as a community trying to encourage big thinking in ambition so so maybe um could you just tell us a little bit about what was going on in what was kind of going through your head as you were kind of taking the first step so I will already mentioned I really don't see myself as an entrepreneur and I come from a background where I even when I started Linux I was 21 years old and I had basically programming half my life at that point so I was in the situation where programming was a hobby but it was almost a habit that I had made some bad mistakes at times and bought some odd computers that were not very well supported and as a result of that I had gone very used to the fact that you can even buy ready-made programs you have to write them yourself because I started off with a vic-20 which was actually fairly common but it was common at the time when it was not common to really buy stuff for it so I started programming then I switched to a computer that was very much unsuccessful the Sinclair QL that had a very small community and again that meant that there was never even a question of running programs that other people wrote if you didn't write your own programs you didn't do anything with that computer pretty much so I had been constantly just doing programming all my life and I was looking for our new project and they all end up being things I used myself plus the occasional game that was so bad that I would never use it so but usually it was things like I wrote my own assembler I wrote my own editor I wrote my own tool for doing this and that and I came to Helsinki University found out about unix and decided I want to have Unix at home and how hard can it be I mean you you really buddy really come from that like history of saying hey I always write my own tools and I mean I actually tried to find commercial tools again and this time it was on a regular PC so you actually would expect that by now 91 you can actually finally in my life I wouldn't have to write my own tool because I could buy it but it turns out I couldn't because it was expensive as hell and it was geared towards literally banks I mean if you looked at UNIX on pcs back in the 90s the main users where we're banking applications and things like that and for some reason when you sell into that market you don't you add three digits at the end of the or of the number just because banks is where the money is obviously right so they'd was not geared towards my kind of use where I wanted it for my own personal use so it wasn't planned it was very much accidental and it literally was a question oh hey I've done my tools all my life I'll do this too interesting what was the can you identify the first point where you you thought that there might be some level of commercial opportunity I can identify the first point where I said what they're selling that yes it would actually happen very early on like I remember I think it was byte magazine in like January 92 or something like that I mean this was really rough this was Linux 0.12 and there was an ad for selling what was the first I was it SLS that was the first one or something where they basically sold the service of you could buy seven flop high-density floppy disks I think and it was I forget how much it was and the only reason I actually know about this was I didn't get that bite myself but Andrew Tannenbaum who we've had a few small discussions before he he actually sent me the notice about this and asked me was this really what you wanted to happen and I was like yes yeah I don't know because by then I had realized it wasn't really about the price but that what I wanted to happen was easy availability of Unix because that was what I had looked for and couldn't find sign in a sense it was like I it was clear that under Tannenbaum expected me to say no I wanted I wanted to be free on the internet and these people who are selling it are evil but I was actually hey it's convenient to buy it if you have the 35 bucks or whatever it was it was not a huge amount of money but it wasn't like five bucks either you can buy it on the floppy and not wait for seven days for it to download over a 300 baud modem or whatever so um how about it early on you know you said you'd obviously been programming for some time some victories and some some some failures I mean can you identify the few kind of things you would have done differently very early or you know and then the converse of mistakes that were made as as you started let's say building it and extending it really the very early days I have a hard time even imagining what I did that I could have done wrong it really none of my programming career was really planned it was a passion for me I started programming when I was so young that that I read all these books about assembly language without really noticing I did not so kind of a background I did not understand that assembly language was supposed to be the symbolic form of a machine code so I always called what I wrote assembly language even though what I actually wrote was the literal numbers I wrote the machine code because I I did not have an assembler so to me assembly language was the data statements that had the numbers in them that's how I started doing assembly language and anybody who actually knew what they were doing would have called that machine code and would have bought an assembler because they realized that's just stupid but I didn't know what I was doing so I literally for several years including my first few months with the Motorola 68 km Blee by hand and actually write machine code so and I was just because I didn't know what I was doing right so how about is the is it you know then fast forward to the kind of Linux community starting to build in terms of management of the community community I mean I think this is a I guess Linux is known to be the biggest collaborative effort of mankind that's read some ethical are called it there's something like that but obviously the management how did how did you get it going so I actually think building the pyramids took a lot more planning than because one of the things that I think is really interesting is how there was serum management there was no logistics there was no planning going on at any point and what happened was through open source people did what they were good at doing so for example I still don't maintain a website I have never in my life done any web programming because I'm not interested I think that kind of stuff is you have Mis people to do that for you right I'm interested in programming and and but there are people out there who who they set up a website and do all the DNS magic and they can do it in their sleep because I mean that's what they do and they don't even think of it as their job it's just that something that they do on the side and and the FIR that's what happened when when I put Linux out for FTP at the firt for the first time I never figured out how to set up an FTP site right there was somebody who did it for me sorry lambda k there was the one business started happening I didn't get into this for the business side I wanted to do again programming so when other people started selling Magnus I Linux I was like yes now I can avoid caring about that side too I got out of for the very early versions I had to do my own programs in user space just because I mean I was the only person there so for the first couple of months I would release not just my kernel sources but I would also release to disk images and to disk images because the first disk image was the binary version of the kernel just so you could write it to the boot floppy and the other disk image contained your root filesystem there was no in it there was no name in it is too fancy we only need a root shell and that's that that's how real men do things right and and then somebody else came along and said hey this is stupid you need to have him it then I was like I do and and and they just did it and I stopped doing my disc images because again that was not what I was interested so the real power of open source as far as I'm concerned well one of them is that different people are good at different things and different people have different interests and what open source really allows is that you don't even had to you don't have to do the planning ahead of the logistics of setting up a company and I realized this is about entrepreneurship and you should set up a company and you should know that you need an Mis person and you need an executive assistant and you need this and that and and you need to know how to balance the books and as far as I'm concerned the big advantage of open source is people do what they're good at and they automatically gravitate towards that if you're good at doing a website you like doing that kind of things you just do it and that was very interesting how there was no planning involved because we didn't need to plan it was all very organic and that's actually how the development has worked to that we have I mean we've had some situations we've had the source control management issues we've had that happen a few times where we had really painful problems with maintaining the source code and and having to to completely change how we did things and then we really had to do that in a planned manner I mean those did not happen randomly but those are actually very few most of what happened in in Linux development was very natural the the hierarchy we we use for doing development the fact that I work with ten maintainer x' roughly it 10 or 20 maintainer x' who all have their own sub areas and they have their sub maintainer x' that they work with and they trust and and they have their portion of their sub areas and we have this network it wasn't like we designed that either it's just happened because that's how people work so a lot of a lot of Linux development has been very very much an organic process I guess trusting a two-way trust between the parties yes but on the other hand we do a lot of this is stuff that I analyze later saying hey that's how it works and I'm wondering why does it work that way but the fact is that is how people work that the whole two-way trust between a small number of people you trust your friends you trust the people you work with for overtime and you don't trust a hundred people I would never trust this audience I mean your you'll either realize it with a 50 couple of guys and gals right you trust your close relatives you trust five 10 15 people even people who know a lot of people even when you have like a huge network of people you rely on you maybe your Linkedin and you have maxed out and you have 5,000 people in your network how many of those do you trust 10 great and that's kind of a basic issue that that the way people work is is I think inherent in our reign I mean that the 10 might be 5 for some people or not that socially adept and it might be 50 for some that are but but at the same time the whole development process actually I think is it's again it works really well and I think one of the reasons it works really well is because it grew up we didn't try to enforce a certain hierarchy on it we used a hierarchy that just worked on its own and that turns out to be the right hired ok yeah maybe my last question and then I'll turn it open to the audience obviously a number of companies have been commercializing Linux in in so my question would be are you kind of satisfied with that end of the way it's been commercialized it's ok it's okay I mean it's it was something that we were nervous about in the beginning I mean no question that when people sergeant and when I say we I mean we I mean by then it wasn't just me it was these other engineers that had slowly started getting involved that whenever it was I mean long before IBM said we'll put a billion dollars we had the smaller companies and and people were worried that what would happen when commercial interests come in and what happened was commercial interests suddenly want to sell Linux so they want to do all the boring crap they do they do QA they do I mean raise your hand if you want to do QA right yeah not a oh there wasn't hand up there but I think that is a joke right and yeah and or doing the whole user interfaces and trying to make it user friendly that was not a high priority for the technical guys especially early on so the the commercial interests actually forced Linux to become much more well balanced than that I mean I'm sure we've had our clashes but at the same time without the commercial guys Linux would never have gone where he was which is kind of sad looking at so many of the open source projects especially at the time I think that has changed but especially at the time a lot of the open source projects were very much anti commercial and there was a very strong we need to keep this free and pure and companies are evil inherently and trying to sell it leads to bad problems and I think I hope that mentality is largely gone now but it certainly was there early on great alright so I'm going to open up for some questions here so first one spot it here so you halt and we have a couple crystal hye-kyo demo let us do you follow any development of any new programming languages do you see any any language except C which is suitable for development of operating system so I have to say I'm kind of old-fashioned and I'm really interested the reason I got into the Linux and our operating systems in the first place was I really loved hardware I loved tinkering with hardware I mean not in the sense that I'm a hardware person I giving me a soldiering I'll iron is a bad idea but I like interacting with hardware from a software perspective and I have yet to see a language that comes even close to C in that respect it's not just that C you can use C to generate good code for hardware it's that if you think like a computer writing C actually makes sense I mean and and I think the reason it works that way is the people who designed C designed it at a time when you I mean when compilers had to be simple and the language had to be kind of geared towards what the output was so when I read C I know what the the assembly language will look like and that's something I care about the I don't do a lot of programming myself anymore I'm a technical lead person I merge other people's code but if you go and look in the Linux kit history and look at what I do the last few months the kind of code I've changed I made sure our found path lookup takes as few cache misses as possible and all that code is C but in order to really be able to its optimized at the level where I worry about single instructions kind of thing and especially single cache misses and I love doing that because that's it's completely I mean to some degree people say you should not micro off to mice but if what you love is micro optimization that's what you should do and we made sure our algorithm our bar are good before we started the micro optimizations so I'm very proud of the fact that we look up past names way faster than anybody else I guarantee it right and we can do it in parallel on a thousand CPA machine with no contention I mean that is something that has happened in the last 18 months and that is impressive I mean you don't know how impressive it is I do until you work with that code for I mean I thought we'd never get there but we're there now so so that's the kind of thing that really excites me from a technical standpoint there next one back here - I was about to ask my question away this morning budding have a chance the Linux operating system is it standard D factor for the service platforms that's for sure and even nowadays is being used for some mobile devices and for many of network switches and so on but it's never been never really an edge of being a competitor at a desktop level right why ah this is my personal failure in Linux that I started Linux as a desktop operating system and it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over that just annoys the hell out of me it's like you said it has had some success in the mobile operating system Google's last numbers where 900,000 new activations every day that's not some success right so the desktop is really hard and I know why it's hard and it's still annoying that the desktop is basically the last holdout the reason the desktop is so hard to crack is most consumers do not want to install an operating system on their machine and that's not desktop centric you don't want to install an operating system your cell phone either right the reason Linux is successful on cell phones is not because you have 900,000 people downloading disk images and installing them on their cell phone every day no it's because it comes on the cellphone pre-installed and that has never happened in the desktop market and it's really hard to get it to happen I mean you you get it there have been companies that sell like Dell even Finland for although I know they do it in you in the US but I think they do it in Finland too that especially if you're a big business and you want to run Linux they will pre install Linux on your desktop but it's something where you have to specify that you want it and they do it for a very limited portion of their of the machines they sell so it's not something very common and if you don't get the pre installs you're never going to get the desktop dominance and will that ever happen right now the biggest hope is projects like Google Chromebook and I have a first generation Chromebook and the thing is slow and horrible and when I get back home I think I should have a second generation Chromebook in the mail just because for some odd reason Google sends me these things so so I will see I'm I know the hardware is so much better so I'm not no longer worried about the the slow part but this is something where I don't think you hit it on the I know you don't hit it on the first generation I don't think you hit it on the second on the third generation maybe on the fourth fifth that's when we start talking if you look at Android it was an Android 1.0 that took off so so I'm hopeful that on the desktop it will happen but the only way it happens is if we have pre installs and it's it's not there today okay over here then up at the top next so you said that you see yourself as a technical person and as the Linux started growing you must have had to deal with a lot of business-related things and you never did I never had to deal with a single business-related thing in Linux ever seriously I had to deal with a lot of other things but business-related things I got queries and I just said well I I don't care we had we had legal issues we had the trademark issue was a huge waste of everybody's time and hugely pointless we've had tons of these stupid things going on but I don't think I've ever had a single business decision or business issue I had to get involved in I and one more thing that when when you were developing Linux you were a developer and you started it as a project but as the system grew your perspective about the operating system yep also changed so how how do you think like how how long did it take for you to grow up as as as who you are now and like what was the difference between that leanness and dis leanness I'm the wrong person to ask the reasons I i mean it's happened gradually and i don't notice the difference right you could probably ask somebody who has known me but not seeing me day to day and say okay compared to the geeky kid who didn't really like to look people in the eye when he was 20 years old what is and what's the big difference between him and the guy that Sutton actually president last night yeah that was so say was I don't know I mean one of the things that still makes Linux interesting for me is a that technical challenges keep on changing so we still do relevant technical work I mean there's no question about that but part of it is my my work has also changed I don't do programming anymore I have had to make things like get and try to make process changes so that we work scaled better as a community and these days I do most of what I do is communication I mean I what I do is I read email I pull people's changes or I tell people that no this is too ugly to live please go away and never approach me ever again so that's kind of what I do and and as that has changed over time and that has kept the whole thing interesting for me and I think for I mean there's there's literally people involved in Linux development who I remember coming in in maybe in late 90 and certainly early 92 so there are other peoples who have been involved with over 20 years but not many but ok back there and then to the front row here hello my name is Miguel I run an open-source can you speak a little louder I Miguel I ran an open-source company bases in Portugal and I'm wondering about the state of patent Wars run companies if you are going to do Linux again the kernel again what license would you choose no I the one choice I'm really still very very happy about is the license choice now admittedly the GPL version 2 is not the original license the original license was something I've wrote and was like three lines of code and it says you may not charge money for it if you make changes you how to send them back to me maybe there's only two lines I can't have C 1 & 2 yeah so but I'm completely convinced the GPL vers version 2 is the right license and that doesn't mean that it's the perfect license it's it's still legalese and it's still there's gray areas in the license and it could have been it could have been better but I really very deeply agree with the things laid out in a GPL version too even though I then very deeply disagree with most of the stuff that comes out of Richard Stallman's mouth so the two are not in any way I mean you don't have to agree with Richard Stallman still like GPL version two right so I would not change I mean I would not change the license that's for sure there might be other things I'd do differently but I can't think of them either let me go build it on do you think Linux is in good hands so that if you decide today not to touch the computer anymore it would go on so show hands how many of you are involved in an open-source project that is not the car okay a fair number how many of you have a core team that is more than ten people there's one ten maybe another tentative hand the normal size for most open-source projects are three people roughly I mean there may be people here I mean there were a couple hands that had more than ten people maybe there would be a some more that had more than five in the kernel we have fifty really I mean 50 people who are very very core every single release every three months we have a thousand people involved that send us patches there's the kernel development community and I do not know why is the deepest development community in the open-source area by far I mean by two orders of magnitude often and if I disappear tomorrow there would be I mean there we'd all have to raise the flag to half-mast and and it would be really sad but nobody would even know and not quite true but there's a lot of people I mean it's not that I make decisions but quite frankly most of the real work is done by many people the there's many layers of decisions even before most code ever reaches me and there are at least three or four of the core developers that can take over my work and do take over my work when I go on vacations occasionally right when I go away for a week I don't even bother I was just let people know that hey please we're not in the merger window just don't bother me too much because I'll I'll be away but if I go away for two weeks I tell people like Greg and David and Andrew and a couple of other people that hey I'm gone for two weeks you're in charge so I have at least four people who are like they can do what I do in fact reg largely does do what I do and they if you know who Greg is you know Greg is safe you don't you don't care so I'm not good ok there's one in the middle although you said you're like really technical person and you're interested in programming and they're not interested in some of the stuffs like user interface and other stuffs but you know whatever you say kind of influence is quite a lot on all those fields for instance you said you didn't really like good on three interface and people are all going like whoa Linda says you know kunam three is crap and some like that so how do you feel about your influence in those kind of fields that you're not interested in so sometimes I'm a bit upset that people take what I say a bit too seriously and and then then five minutes later I said screw that I don't care right I like that people take me seriously but at the same time I refuse to then let that mean that I don't say what I mean I mean I've always wanted to be very honest in my my statements I use strong language on the Internet to the point where some people feel offended and that's their problem I actually think that especially in a community like open-source other developers need to know how I feel about things I'm not I'm impolite because I'm impolite I mean I'm not making excuses for that but I also actually believe that when when you work with a lot of people it's better to be really open about your feelings so that you don't have people who by mistake miss read you I've had that happen I have literally had developers who were working on things that I didn't really like but I didn't shut down early enough they worked on it for a long time they felt that it was ready they submitted it to me and I said no this is horrible because at that point I had to make a decision and in at least one of those cases I had some other friends basically email me later and saying the guy's suicidal right I mean I and that's not my fault but at the same time I I might be fine open early on and saying hey this is going down a direction that I don't like I think that's actually healthier for everybody involved instead of me stringing people around along and trying to be polite so partly it's my personality I am blunt and I am from Finland and I tell people what I feel like but partly it's actually a conscious choice to say no I'm not going to tone it down just because somebody might be hurt interesting okay over here so many things happen Linux was accidental gate was accidental what yep actually I'm proud of gift I want to say this yeah it was accident it was the fact that I had to write get was accidental but Linux the design came from a great mind and that great mind was not mine I mean you have to give credit for the design of Linux to kerning Hammond Ritchie and and Thompson I mean there's there's a reason I like UNIX and why I wanted to redo it I do want to say that git is a design that it's mine and unique and I'm proud of the fact that I can damn well also do a good design from scratch ok nice so what's so what's the latest accidental theme that you work I may have to come back to that because I can't I mean we've had a lot of stuff that was accidental I mean the fact that for example that we do fairly well in cell phones and that multi-core in cell phones is actually important now and we're really good at it was an accidental result of the fact that we happen to do supercomputers 10 years ago so there's those kinds of accidents that happen that our accidents because different people work on different kind of projects and it turns out that 5 years after the fact there were actually things that connected them that nobody ever saw coming right and that's that's been a huge success of Linux and I think that's interesting from a technical standpoint how important it has been for Linux to actually have one single kernel for every single device out there I don't think people and I didn't actually think it would be possible but if you look at every single other operating system out there ever nobody has ever done that before look at Apple they have separate operating systems for the for their low-end devices and their high-end devices look at Microsoft same thing they're claiming that they're trying to merge them in Windows 8 they're lying they're not they're full of [ __ ] the only but Linux is yeah but anyway true that we did it because I actually care about beauty and it turns out it was nicer to do it the way Linux did and it's a unique thing in Linux and it's a big strength because it turns out there's often these kinds of accidental technical connections that people didn't believe in at the time but then things change then and now cellphones have the same issues that super computers that hi I'm interested in the time that you spent at the University and back in the early days and I know that you were at least briefly a member of a research group and I was wondering what kind of experience that was and I know that you did some teaching assistants which turned out to be surprisingly beneficial in meeting your wife and so on but I was all over the mat I loved being at the University I really liked the University for many reasons like I assume most of you are technical people from well now all the universities so you think the University people are like these theoretical nerds that are useless for any real work I love the the abstract side of the computer science at Helsinki University which is very different from I think the computer science here at ekk our alt I loved spectrum the only time I really was over here was when we were in the pink coveralls and and ran around drinking beer I was a TA at university I did I did a stint for halfie or a year in the Henrietta's research group it was interesting and it means that yes it took me like nine years to get a master's degree which you're pretty fast then yeah well you're supposed to be faster I will say that one of the it wasn't quite nine years I think it was eight and a half one of the years was literally me just I could forcing myself to write the thesis I had everything ready and I'm one of those a lot of people like that I know I've heard other people have exactly the same issue that you have everything done and the only thing you have less left is the writing of the your final thesis and one of the impetus for the four action moving to the US was I gotta when I got a job offer I was saying okay this will finally force me to do my thesis because I I refuse to to leave that university have done so so I I actually get my the papers from Helsinki University until after I already moved to the US but I had finalized everything I enjoyed the university of life and I did a lot of different things and for those of you who are young enough to still be studying hey enjoy the hell out of that time because it was some of my favorite time oh can i connect continuation on that why didn't you follow the academic side any further oh it's easy I you noticed I had trouble writing my thesis I I love being at the University but I hate writing papers I'm I'm not actually bad at it I'm I'm a I think I am a reasonably good writer I have a hard time getting started I want to have when I write something I want to have like point to my writing I want it to flow and if I don't see exactly how I get from the beginning to the end and and make it all make sense I can't get started or I have a very hard time getting started and quite frankly if you don't like writing papers you should not stay at the University and I mean I realized that and said it had been mine I used to think that I would be a scientist and stay at university and I realized no I just don't like freaking papers I don't really like teaching I have to go to the industry and I love going to a startup so if any of you ever get the chance startups that are early in their startup career when they're still doing the early technical stuff and they do not see where it's going and and everybody's really gung-ho are absolutely a wonderful work experience I was at transmeta for seven years and five of those years were wonderful and then when the IPO was getting closer it suddenly changed from not being so much about the technology and suddenly you had to worry about customers and you had to worry about money and an IPO issues and suddenly it wasn't fun anymore just I stayed on for a while and then I said no this is not what I signed up for but just a quick last question did you get any support for Linux from the University and which you have liked some I I did and there's a finish saying I don't remember the saying but there's a finish saying that you you should not stand up because you get cut down what's the saying okay I'm sure there is because I've heard it I've heard actual Finnish people ask me that wasn't it uncomfortable to to stand out didn't people try to put you down and try to make you part of the same gray mass as everybody else and I had absolutely the reverse experience at Helsinki University it wasn't like they wear there was not a lot of special support but every all the people were very happy about me running my experimental stuff on the University Network and they were really happy when we did that I mean that's just an example a small detail when we did the 1.0 release in 94 or something the university wanted to give us the like big main auditorium at the computer science or a building and they I mean everybody was really nice and and they there was a lot of the computer science department got an alpha based machine because they realized that I was porting Linux the Alpha and they thought this is an interesting project there was actually a lot of support but it wasn't like official support but in within the computer science department I think people in general were really nice and the whole sure it was odd I mean they everybody inside the university realized how odd it was that something practical came out of the computer science room but but at the same time it was it was like that's cool I didn't know we could do that so it was fun I really liked Helsinki University I mean I'm sure I would have liked af2 but I had a great time at Husky University ok the question over here u-hall oh no you have it ok so a short backstory on the so to explain my question is like I got myself a few years ago a laptop l had to graphic cards it had an input and an Nvidia and it had the famous optimist chip that was difficult to operate from Linux and I saw at the beginning I was like expecting to get support at some point and it was kind of difficult at the beginning and full supports came something like a half a year ago with one project that's on github that's working pretty nice but what I saw that at some point I was kinda expecting that maybe Nvidia would kind of chip in and do something for it and they set flat-out no we're not doing any support and I was like well we're playing in the same sandbox why can't be nice to each other it's like like things like this that we cannot have the hardware producers think about the other stuff as well they're they're like hard set on that you cannot really think cooperate with them on basis like what what's your comment on this that kind of situations I know exactly what you're talking about and I'm very happy to say that it's the exception rather than the rule and I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spot we've had with hardware manufacturers and that is really sad because then media tries to sell chips a lot of chips into the Android Market and NVIDIA has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with so Nvidia [ __ ] you making some friends there don't get me wrong I'm not saying that other companies are perfect either we we have had companies that just don't care we've had companies that felt that Linux wasn't a big enough market we've had we'd have situations like that at the same time there's a lot of companies that have been very helpful since very early days and it's I think it's very sad when you sell hardware and you actually use Linux and you're being really difficult about it and and I really yes I'm sad when it happens we can't do anything about it but it's life I wish everybody was as nice as I am which okay so all right I want to bring up a conical open source movement up a little bit different kind and this this comes up in the university connection here and that's kind of OpenCourseWare there are lots of like developments like okay MIT OpenCourseWare and then the US company Coursera by some famous people that offer kind of open classrooms one hundred thousand people and so on so do you care take care do you care to take a guess how this market will or this kind of open source work will go forward I have a really hard time really making any judgment but I do think it's really interesting how it's not just Linux but there's been other like the openness of the links development model has clearly kind of made some people stand up and think how can we use this in our area and and sometimes it's been in odd places but but I like for example the open course work is wonderful I love the discussion that a lot of scientists have about open publications and and that kind of thinking I think is very healthy but I can't answer your question I don't know how can I work out okay here hey although you could it is in the 80s and 90s most of the people who used computers they had some kind of clue that what is the code like what they are using and also many of them were like making code themselves but nowadays like most of the people in Western world are using computers but they don't have any clue that what is in in the computer and what is the code so what do you think that would be said injeel for children in elementary school that could make them think that they also can make their own to own tools right portion so i'm of the opinion that one of the great strengths we have as humans as a species is how good we are at specializing and if you think about all the progress we've made we've largely made it because certain people specialize in certain things and can do it much more efficiently that way and I absolutely think that is true when it comes to things like being very technical and doing programming at a low level I do not believe in a world where everybody every child should be taught to program I just don't think that makes sense that said what I do think makes tons of sense is to make sure that every child who has the capacity to really be passionate about programming and be one of those people who can specialize in this those people should be encouraged and they should have the possibility of noticing that hey this is really good and this is really cool so I love the projects like Raspberry Pi that make just cheap computers available because if you if you have successful projects I'm not saying the Raspberry Pi is going to be successful I love the concept of it and and let's see how it actually works out but I think it's very important to have cheap throw away literally throw away computers that allow people to tinker and if that means that 99 of 100 raspberry pies will basically gather dust because nobody uses them that's fine if one of them made somebody realize hey this is cool and started program so that's kind of my opinion that I don't think we should try to make everybody program but we should try to make sure that everybody who has an aptitude for programming should have the ability to notice and be noticed hey you wanna promote the Center for Entrepreneurship entrepreneurs they always thought that they should have a vision for the business so are you saying that you didn't have any vision for the Linux in the beginning and do you have it now where is that a question coming from I just feel very do there you you were sitting down so I tend to call myself an anti visionary because to me what is much more important vision is execution and I've always quote Edison saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% percent inspiration so you do need to have the inspiration but in the end lots of people have ideas it's actually finishing them and overcoming all the problems you will hit that is the sign of somebody who has a passion and really takes it all the way that said I think you I mean I'm the kind of person who believes in hard work and attention to detail and just doing a lot of work I think it's probably healthy to have a certain amount of vision - I don't think you in in some cases having vision maybe what gets you past the problem my argument has often been that if you like look at the Stars all the time you will stumble over the pothole in the ground because you're not looking where you're walking but so just because I'm a pedestrian looking at the details kind of person maybe those visionary people do something good - I'm not I'm not going to I go to too bad my I believe Maureen having passion I think really caring about what you do is way more important than than having this mental vision of this golden future that you want to reach yes do you like to see linux overtaking like Microsoft and and do you expect that to happen soon so I have to admit I don't gain I mean I I'd love for gaming platforms to be more open because gaming platforms tend to be those the most closed pieces of technology you can find almost and I think that's kind of sad because it means that they are designed to basically exclude people from trying things out at the same time I understand exactly why the companies are doing this whole razorblade sell the razor for cheap and get the money through razor blades approach I understand why they do it so I'm not complaining too much it would be lovely to see more open-source gaming and it is an area where people have I mean spent some time and I used to believe that open source programs were all about technical things because that's what they used to be use of open-source compilers and editors and operating systems and like geeky technical things and I used to think that's all you'll ever ever do because developers do technical things I was wrong I mean there's tons of open source programs in other areas I don't think there's a a lot of open-source good games and part of that may be that games are a lot about content and you really maybe need a different mindset about that but I don't know okay - two more questions one here why you how do you see the future of open source and open innovation menu when we see a lot of startups coming up nowadays I mean how should startups approach the open source and open innovation movement so I I think if you're a startup what you should do about open source is take advantage of it I mean that's really I mean you need that you you as a startup you need every edge you can get and one of the edges you have is your small and nimble and you can take open source and you can try to really tune it for whatever special needs you're aiming for and I think startups especially in and new really oddball technologies that you're trying to drive that nobody has done before that's when you should take advantage of open source and say hey we can build up on this base that is boring and does all these things that everybody has already done and we'll add our special magic sauce on top and and really take advantage of the open source model and I think people do that but I think they should maybe do it more consciously sometimes okay okay last one yep hello everybody I'm you ha beside you don't know where I'm from but I know where you are so I have a question for the audience how many of you were part of the Big Mama Miko adventure hands up Oh so not all of us are born evil but I have to confess that now I joined the ranks of Nvidia we're not up streaming a figure of support anyway just to make you happy even though you gave me the finger I'd ask you thank you okay very good I actually I like being outrageous at times it's it's amusing to see I guarantee you if you make that video available on the internet there will be thousands of people who are really upset and I you know an offended I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended it's good all right okay great okay I need to cut it here so um Wow fantastic stuff really appreciate all of you guys coming here I want to give a couple couple thank-yous absolutely first to Technology Academy of Finland I know my hard off for helping us get leanness here to talk to the straight thing second thing is I want to thank also the Aalto entrepreneurship society and the summer startups gang for helping here really everybody here who has interest in building something of your own you should look into the events of Aalto entrepreneurship society and the things going on at the Alta venture garage so let's give those guys a big hand unless we have a small prize award another not quite as big as the is the Millennium prize but we actually have another fantastic organic movement that actually started from from Aalto Thank You satola goes that means it they I really need three of the East I'm ok we'll get those yeah Rovio is a great partner to everything going on at Alto right now so thanks a lot and uh well as I told Lina's before we're happy to ship these things your place isn't better expect good but uh and then of course last leanness thanks for spending your time here I know it's uh it's been a wild week but um hopefully this has been a good way to cap it off ya know I enjoy doing that question and answer session so getting out a bit more like feedback is always funny I hope you enjoyed it too good all right

Channel: aaltouniversityace

Views: 1,796,657

Keywords: Linus Torvalds, Will Cardwell, Linux, Aalto University

Id: MShbP3OpASA

Length: 63min 56sec (3836 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/sirbruce]

One minute later: "I wish everyone was as nice as I am."

[u/rwg]

Makes a great desktop background...

[u/H5Mind]

That came across as heartfelt and sincere. Given Android's market share, as Linus pointed out, I wonder what has been going on at nVidia HQ to prepare for the near future?

[u/GrognakTheBarbarian]

I'm surprised to hear this. Back a couple of years ago when I used Ubuntu, I always heard that Nvidia drivers worked much better then ATI's.

[u/huhmz]

Those of us who use the LG 2X with CM9 this statement is just as current as it ever has been. Nvidia refuses to release drivers to their Tegra 2 chipset and LG's software department is also a fucking joke.

[u/Drunkensailorxx]

"I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended"

I'm stealing that quote

[u/MadFerIt]

Guys this has much more to do with Nvidia's Android position then graphics cards. They are completely unwilling to open-source most of the Tegra series SoC drivers.

[u/[deleted]]

Linus is going to be a great grumpy old man.

[u/Nvidia]

Well fuck you too, Linus.