Keynote: Linus Torvalds

2002 and so in a lot of ways this has kind of become you know sort of a regular and fairly important part of my calendar of a year and in fact it's far from the first time that my birthday has overlapped in fact a year that I will probably never forget in 2003 for lots of reasons in Perth we actually had the banquet and the keynote that I gave was on my birthday so LCA my birthday all get tangled up and thank you very much for recognizing that this morning before we jump into the Q&A though this week as I've talked to people I've realized that there are a couple of you know loops that I should try to close first of all for those of you who were at LCA last year how many of you sat in on the talk that I gave or watched the video since I'm really pleased to report that a year makes a heck of a difference we were able to move into the new house built on our property at the end of September and the dust is literally starting to settle as is snow it's that time of year in Colorado also earlier this week my good friend Evan Moglen was asked about the status of freedombox and had this to say I'm pleased to report that trading a little sleep for other things last night I can tell you and to just the abundantly clear about this the only contribution I've made to the freedombox ODOT 3 release other than talking about it this morning is one package upload to Debian a couple of days ago since I arrived at LCA there folks like Steele Mohan and Nick daily and Petter Reinhold Stone who've been carrying the torch over the last year so and I'm really appreciative of that you know go take a look at this there's still lots of things to do if this is a project that you're interested in and would like to help with I'm sure they'd still love to have your help so enough about those sorts of things and me and all of that well maybe not quite this is not the first time that I have shared the stage at LCA with these folks [Music] given the little you know ticket selling thing this morning if my beard is worth on the order of 40 thousand dollars Australian a 3d printer has got to be worth something more than that but in fact if we go all the way back to 2003 part of the reason that year is so significant to me is that at that LCA leanness and try to do something that hadn't been done until then at an LCA which was to just take questions from the audience for a while and I have said to the organizers several times since that that's one of my personal favorite sessions and an LCA ever and part of the reason for that is that I actually like taking questions from people and I like having some sense of what other people want to hear about as opposed to just standing and talking for a really long time the other part was I think that was actually the first time that leanness and I ort regenerated actually shared a stage and that has sort of set the stage if you will for lots of things that have happened since of course um there's some people who just couldn't leave well enough alone I think within food questions yeah that's my mic you this so I was reviewing the audio from 2003 which how many of you here were at the 2003 Q&A are fantastic great so can anyone remember you know who interjected in the first two questions rusty right so the first thing he interjected and then we realized that it was inevitable and we called him down to the front to join the panel and we thought we might as well just short-circuit that now because [Applause] [Applause] thank you for us tu verus we already set up the fourth chair ready for you the other thing we had at the 2003 event was we had chopper chops and so there will be again chopper chopper rewards for questions so if you want to chop chop you have to ask your question and that also happened in 2003 oh that was lanús that tried to grab one at the beginning and we told him that he had to earn it first so you'll get one at the end laters right so shall we start off in any more photos speed up no that'll solve for the photos but we did also have an audio recording of the session from 2003 I think you thought there are a couple of questions from that yes indeed so we had we had a few questions so how did how many of you actually listened to the link that I send out to the chat list the audio right there was a few pertinent questions I think that deserves an updated answer from you know 12 years later to see how it's going so the first question that was asked was when he's 2.6 going to be released so dear men but when 2.6 was released I have no idea this is why I have source control these days there was a follow-up question which you know is 2.5 ready to use this to try yet and I think we need an update on that you think 3.5 is ready to use this that was such a huge disaster that we change the whole development model say there was a couple of other questions that I thought were worth worth revisiting one was about trusted computing and signed code and so remember the audience asked about what leanness thought about trusted computing and signed code and so just just to give you certainly what you answered at the time you said that you're asked a vendor if there is an actual use case for a signed kernel and the answer was no and you thought it was just marketing so would you like to update that answer so these things were used to do it even without vendors asking for it we use it internally and I use it internally for example for signing all my modules and I think it's a great use especially the way I do it which is generate random keys that you throw away after you've generated the modules which means that nobody can ever try to insert anything in your kernel so it's a great security measure it can obviously and I think that's something I've said for a long time although I have no idea what I said 12 years ago is that a lot of these security measures that are vilified in this community are actually can be very useful and sometimes they have really good reasons for being used even if some people tend to hate them intensely but but things have clearly changed we we do use it ourselves and I use it personally all the time so the final question I think is worth reprising from the 2003 event was about ipv6 at the time if you recall your answer was that ipv4 is good enough for most people because you don't want to give your shoe and IP address and so you also said that ipv6 there's a decade away now 12 years later it's probably less than decade okay away and most people here probably use it on your cell phones I don't actually know how the New Zealand telcos work it turns out a little I mean ipv4 clearly is still majorly useful and and while ipv6 now works I'd give it at least a decade before ipv4 is actually gone if ever we'll see it's I always thought that ipv6 was way over designed and made it more complicated and more painful than it needed to be and private networks and things like that means that not everybody needs to use a public IP address anyway and a lot of people do for no good reason so your shoes if they do want an IP address maybe they could use one of your private network IP addresses and you can still use your shoes with ipv4 [Music] so I think they're the key relevant questions from 2003 so you may have noticed I sent an email to the chat list yesterday asking for people to think up good questions for today's session and so how many people have got questions for today's session a few people right so we'd like Eva come down and stand in front of the microphone down here to ask the question and if there's any applause at all you know at the end of answering your question you get a chopper chopper things so first person come please come down to the front and ask a question yep so I sort of come down the gallery the round the back or bump apart if you want to just send and queue up in front of the microphone here morning so Lina's nice easy question to start with over the years various people including myself if I have reduce their involvement in the current community or step away from is entirely due to the tone on L KML and especially your contribution to that why do you continue to argue that being really unpleasant people's until either ship strategy question that's not actually my real argument my real argument is that people are different and I'm a really unpleasant person and that's what it really boils down to is that and some people think I'm nice and and some people are then shocked when they learn different and I'm not a nice person and I don't care about you really I care about the technology and I care about the kernel and I really think that a lot of projects in the open-source communities sometimes care about non-technical things too much and the reason I say that is that the only thing we can actually agree on ever tend to be technical issues and if we start making a big deal about non technical issues that are important that get me wrong I'm not saying they're not important I'm saying that whenever we start making non technical issues the primary issues that just guarantees we'll never agree right and I'm not trying to really make excuses I'm more trying to explain that this is where I come from and and I appreciate the diversity in open source but to me that diversity is not about gender it's not about skin color it's about people are different and people are different in what they are interested in people are different in what they're good at skin coloring gender and all these issues that get brought up that's really important things those are details what it's great about open source is that some people are unpleasant that they're technically really good right some people are pleasant and like bringing other people in and and I think that's one of them maybe the most important part about open source is that you can do what you're good at so when you look at bringing in minorities bringing in females bringing in people who don't speak English my argument has been and is that we should look for people who are good at being that people who can be between other people right there are lots of good kernel developers who are great at working with people and they may not even be great technically and that doesn't matter because we all have strengths right and this is my argument and I refuse to change well nothing that sounds bad it's not that I refuse to change it's that I don't think I want to try to bow down to what other people think my personal personality is very abrasive I love arguing but being at the Museum of Technology I was I spend the whole time just arguing with people right I mean and if you're that kind of personality when you are only ok now you will argue and I know there are other kernel developers that are like me and I know there are other kernel developers who not like me and that's all wonderful and that was a really long answer to a really simple question but the fact is that's how I feel and please introduce yourself at the start the question 50 good morning my name is Tommy Richards and Matthew kind of stole my question well maybe I can I don't work in kernel development I'm not subscribed to the Linux kernel mailing list but I am in the community and I've noticed a worrying trend which is that over the last year this being more hate has been more abuse more vitriol in IRC mailing lists on Google+ and speaking as professional this really concerns me because I love my job I want to love it in 20 years time but if this trend continues I will not be in the industry in 20 years time so I'd like to know event as already answered but maybe that these other three of you could maybe tell us you all have a lot of influence in this room and in the wider community do you have any plans to try and improve the community for the theater for the rest of us I think we have other people who want to answer that I'll get this plea I think basically what you're saying is not actually true I think the tone on L KML I don't know about IRC maybe people in IRC other Bhaskar's and really it's masturbating okay Mel I think has been getting better what has happened is that there's a lot of system date there's talk and it's become a thing that is a newsworthy so I actually think I'll KML has in many ways come down and then people try to make a big deal out of it and and make use of behavior that is not different but disagreement so you know rusty mention systemd those of you who have been paying attention will realize that I don't know my life and that of Keith and various other folks who were here got really tangled up in this whole in its system debate and it really came to a head and the Debian community in the last year hadn't noticed the interesting thing about that community is that yes we ended up in a situation where we had a question that was partially technical and partially not so technical and emotions ended up running immensely hot particularly for some of the core participants in that debate slash discussion process and you know emotions got hot to the borderline nuclear level for a little while and it was immensely uncomfortable as you know one of the folks on the wrong end of some of the vitriol around that uncomfortable I'm being polite because you are sort of all my extended family here and I don't say things to you that I might say to other folks but the really intriguing thing is all of that vitriol represents what I have described before is the vocal minority and we did have a problem in the entire free software world where sometimes we are too willing to let the vocal minority represent us and to sort of set the tone or the agenda for some of the discussions I'm here to tell you that in the Debian community in particular the community is strong the community is healthy the community is recovering brilliantly from that whole ruckus around the Annette system today work is progressing the next stable release it's coming along pretty much on schedule you got a little extra time go help us chase down the remaining set of release critical bugs and at the end of the day part of what I think leanness might be trying to sort of get at around the edge a little bit is it's okay for us to have times where we all let our passions overflow and get in trouble with each other on sort of a personal interaction and communication spaces as long as at the end of the day you somehow figure out how to make things right with all the folks that matter in the communities that we're working in and I really hope that if nothing else all of us here today can go forward into 2015 conscious of the fact that a lot of what we've read and a lot of what gets amplified in the press and on blog posts and all of that sort of stuff is the opinion of the vocal minority and many of us who would like to be in the silent majority are still just fine everything's good we're gonna do it we can to support the friends and diverse friends around us and let's not get so distracted by all of this if we can help it that's the thing that would help me to feel better about some of the stuff we've had to deal with over the last while and a half to agree with lanús I think we have to be very very careful not to assume that the amount of noise we see in the press and elsewhere is truly indicative of what it's like to be part of most of the open-source development communities that we know yeah so as someone completely outside the system debate I haven't seen any escalation and verbal but this trend has been pretty much downhill I think for the last place five years right and by downhill he means better I don't think we ought to give a shout out they've been there been important folks in our community who have been doing really great things because it's what they're good at to try and help improve our openness to diversity candidates I'm really pleased by the diversity sponsorship at this and other recent LCAs and the fact that that's brought some interesting people into the LCA community a shout out to Karen Sandler and the other folks involved in the outreach program for women that has generated some really interesting new folks in the community who've done really useful technical work and are getting jobs on the basis of that and all those sorts of things we've seen the same thing you know we've seen a number of projects making concrete efforts to try and increase their openness to contributions from different and diverse folks it's not that there isn't a problem out there somewhere I think it's tough to be careful about focusing on what the problem actually is and recognize and reward when things move in the right direction instead of spending so much time pointing fingers when somebody gets emotional hi Kris Jenner hi I'm Yoko so is it the year of Alex - stop it I should in tradition in 2003 and rusty you actually answered that and your answer was - by the end of 2004 it would be 50% Linux desktop in the world so how's that worked out for you rusty you know it's still so difficult to measure [Music] follow me a 50% of my desktops running extrapolating that it's okay who is running Linux desktop on your desktop or laptop Thank You excellent and on smartphones we are 80% okay something slightly different from the previous ones those of us of a certain age got into computing mostly I think from the old 8-bit computers and I remember like there were picture books for kids that taught advanced basic and even machine language now the world is a different place now and there's anything like that some people are trying like you know reverse repo anything but I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on getting the younger generations into our community because it's all about learning software literacy and understanding how our computers work and it doesn't seem to be there's much encouragement for the younger ones to join our community and basically fill the Ranchers we sort of aged so far younger ones you mean under 30 I wish I had the answer to that because I've got three kids and none of them seem to be interested in technology except as users well that's not true but these thing computers in the sense I'm interested in computers and I think part of the problem is there's the technology of today is so complicated that for something like me who is interested in kernels that used to be easy to get in at at the hardware level and that's simply not true in computers anymore and the world has moved on and we're old farts for a reason that said it's much easier to get involved in many other ways maybe you're not into computers and you're into the whole 3d printing thing and maybe you're into doing these user application things and they're way easier to do that they used to be so I don't have an answer I I don't really worry it's not the same thing anymore there's no point in teaching everybody machine language or basic or something like that I I'm looking at most young people tend to be pretty tech savvy right so I wouldn't really worry they may not be kernel tech savvy but we don't need everybody to do that yeah I think there's also this immense trend that we've done aware of and effective in some talks around edges of this here at this conference and that's towards accessibility of microcontroller platforms and other places where kids are really enthusiastic because they see a direct connection between little bits of programming and action that affects the real world I discovered a really long time ago well before I have kids of my own and it's something that I've enjoyed playing with them with that you know on some mobile computers are kind of boring I mean there's all sorts of things you can do with them and my kids are certainly far more literate and quick to go you know grab a computer to do something than even I sometimes but there's this immense so the feedback would think that works well if you even get to the point where they're turning an LED on or off or getting a servo to move or so my strong suggestion if you've got kids or you're trying to figure out how to get younger people enthusiastic is look for places where there's an intersection between simple computing devices and real-world effects and feedback loops and you know if they figure out how to write a little bit of code and an Arduino thing or something then they might end up thinking trying to eternal development is interesting someday I'm not sure whether would but hi I'm Simon my question is we do you see system D being in the next five years is it just a new is it just a new you div or maybe Divis I don't know why the system the question comes up because I don't even care I I'm a system be user and I am NOT being involved in any of those arguments at all that I know of apart from not liking one particular person I'm pretty sure detail doesn't want to take that question so I used system B most of you probably do use system D it's all good III didn't care either until yesterday apparently they've got masquerading support and I looked at the code that the patch that actually put that in they don't fork out two IP tables because that would be smaller so they use it directly and actually the code fairly sane so you know as long as the codes pretty good it's I don't really understand what all the fuss is about so just to be clear the real reason I don't want to take that question is I don't try to predict five years in the future about much of anything and events in my life in the last couple of years it made it clear that trying to predict too far into the future is you know that way lies madness part of the reason that I ended up taking the decision that I made in the whole Debian systemd thing is that it seemed to be the place where there was the most enthusiasm activity and good stuff being worked on for the future and one of the reasons that we worked hard to constrain the actual decision that we made in the Debian project to the next stable release cycle is we have no idea what will be the hot shiny right thing to be using another release cycle later my anticipation is that people continue to poke at it and do good things and and hopefully it ends up being you know code that we're all ok with okay my question is for Lunas um Venice when you do like the current version control is wrote it and you didn't like your duck you don't find a good dive lock so you wrote your own dive lock what are you working on now that is not on the colonel IQ pecking on something nice I'm not honestly I'm a lazy person which is like why I like open source I got all these people to do all my job Network I don't really want to have other projects that I want to do is just sit on a beach and sick a foo-foo drink can just let you guys do the work the fact that then occasionally I've had to say okay in order to be lazy for the next five years I have to do something that's why right now the thing I've always cared about as being the kernel and right now not good or something the kernel development process seems to be working really well and we don't have any huge looming concerns and I hope I'm not wrong about that so so we seem to have found a model that is working is getting us where we want to go and and it we're I'm coasting well right now I'm coasting then the merge window comes along and it gets crazy for a few weeks again but so I don't have any projects I'm working on I'm hope to next week work on my dive log thing that I started that I gave up way but that's even that hope is more like I hope things work so well that I don't need to thank you we better hear a triple question here I am just reading the other day about this new machine the machine that will have made the petabytes of memory stirs so you don't have files because everything permanent and memory the same thing there for Linux can't handle it you need a much better offering system that doesn't deal with files for deals with maybe structures what you have to say about that - Colby went to Utah so while not a number of our communities just rejoined HP in order to work on the Linux port to the Machine the one thing that might be worth I mean if Keith wants to come up and speak but I don't think he does one thing that might be worth mentioning is even when you have persistent memory and you can imagine a world where everything is in RAM and it never goes away that won't necessarily really change things as much as some people say because you will still want to have a fast and just to organize this thing persistence also means that I mean one of the advantages of RAM and it goes away is that you do something and then you throw it away and that means you don't have to manage it as much because it the fact that it's ephemeral means that it's also something you don't need to care about long term if you have persistent RAM or run memristors or any other kind of model you will still need to have a file system just to have a way to organize these things that stay around for years and years they won't change that it will change the details in the file system when you have byte address ability you can do things that you can do with disks but we already see that with SSDs that just the performance differences mean that you do different things in file systems than you used to do 20 years ago or 50 years ago some of the one of the things I would suggest is that what's really interesting about the machine is that the intersection of a couple of parallel long-term technology development trends that are going to hit the market at about the same time are going to give us the opportunity sort of all at once to throw more existing assumptions up in the air possibly bathroom completely out the window then normally happens when we're watching sort of the study evolution of technologies Lynx is absolutely right the introduction of SSDs changed the way we think about performance and a storage subsystem right I mean you know gone are the days when you know elevator algorithms for managing you know block transfer sequencing we're fundamental to being able to get any kind of useful performance out of a storage system all the needs the concerns the pinch points just a move it'll be different but it won't be it's not like the whole world magically got simpler suspend and resume is going to be really fast there's been so many technical questions don't ask a meta question instead so you can be purely opinion masti given that Australia New Zealand technically share the same airspace do you think that they should come together and form a combined Space Agency given that were the only g20 nation without one yeah I mean we technically all shared the same airspace and it's expensive and I think we all need to get together to really go into space I'm really the wrong person to ask of all the people in this room I'm probably pretty low down on the list to really answer that question so I already had a question about a machine and the next Plus+ and things like that do you think there'll be any innovation in hardware in the next few years where the Linux kernel possibly couldn't make the transition very quickly and what do you think the implications would be for all of us and will that work as a whole if Linux loses the dominance it's achieved over the past decades I wouldn't lose sleep over yeah and I really don't lose sleep over in fact I think in the computer industry in general the big question is not what happens to software in the next few years but what happens to Hardware on when scaling stops and it's not happening in a few years but it's happening in 10 and it's getting much more gradual and maybe somebody will come up with something really radically new and there are people who argue that hey we've been saying that scaling will stop for the last 50 years and it hasn't stopped for the last 50 years it will stop people who believe in quantum computers are before after stop before after the year the 1x2 stop I really think what happened is this Linux desktop scaled down and now we have it in our pockets so better but but we're really at the point where in ten years five nanometers that's not a lot of atoms and the whole computer industry I mean software - don't get me wrong but the whole computer industry has for a long time lived on the notion that the computer five years from now will be fundamentally different and faster what happens when that's not true on a chip level anymore you could still improve right you can do clever things and you can improve that it's not going to be the same kind of improvement and we've seen some of it already but it's going to get much worse and that will impact a software - but I think it will impact the hardware people much much more and that's going to be interesting in 10 to 15 years what happens [Applause] I might mentioned there was a similar question action in 2003 to that each other I think I was worth mention at this point there was a question about somebody who's audience said that in that 20 years before so 1983 they had a computer on their desk that could write letters to their mum and print and now you know 20 years later 2003 they've had a computer on the desk that could write letters to their mum and print you know what's changed that 20 years now the answer at the time from Beetle actually was that it's got slower that's what's changed but I asked a couple of people about that before this and they said well what's changed in the last you know 12 years and the answer for several people was it got faster again a couple of weeks was a Jewish three weeks ago there was this big surprise that it turned out of many kernel developers don't know how memory allocation works I think LW dotnet wrote too small to fail a problem so I thought to myself then well 10-15 years ago the answer to that problem would probably be to have RTFM the question today I will ask which file menu we should have read do you think that documentation of the kernel is appropriate do you have any idea how to improve that well I clearly have no idea how to improve documentation the kernel this is where others sometimes step up and do a great job of explaining small details at the same time there was a talk yesterday about how programming should be provably correct and it's it would be a great thing if we could prove correct we all suck at it and and I don't take that approach I'm more of a touchy-feely guy I believe in biological processes and I believe in evolution and I believe in all these making mistakes and trying and we don't have documentation for how humans work but humans work really really well except when they break down and I actually think we're at the stage and we have been at the stage in kernel development and in a lot of technology where nobody really understands everything that's going on the VM is complicated deal with it and just realize that the answer to that is not to make the VM simpler because the VM is complicated for a reason it's doing all these crazy things and a lot of them are heuristics they don't have hard reasons for it there often is no this is what you need to do this is the correct answer a lot of the time it's like we want to go in roughly that direction and we don't even know how to get there but if we do this most the time it works that's how a lot of real problems in real life are and that is hard to document when there is no real answer and we should continue to document the big rules we should continue to document the details like how memory ordering works which was another subject that came up to yesterday but that still will never be in the situation where we can give a spec for the kernel and I don't think we should even try we should we should just realize that okay life is complex and we do the best we can and we need to have smart people but we also need to have a lot of people who test a lot of people who are willing to accept that I don't know what the solution is but I know what is better than what we do today in this area and if you continue to do that this is how biological systems work and it's a provably working process it doesn't get you to the perfect end result but it gets to you to something that works better than anything else we've ever seen [Applause] Oh chopper chopper so just did anyone else part of try mean on that yeah so when I wrote route an air filter the first time I actually wrote a hacking how-to that always details on how it all worked and how you could extend it and everything else and the first time I received a major patch I was really excited the patch was great and I said what did you think of the hacking how-to and of course he said what helped it and so the lack of documentation does provide a filter for contributions that is true because they have to read the code anyway because the documentation will lie so why not skip the first point and make the basic code immediately because they'll have to deal with it so in practice I found that effort putting the documentation in the kernel with normal paid back I actually disagree I mean we have areas where we document small details like locking rules and and these kinds of very specific and very targeted areas we do need to have documentation because they are they are things that people can keep in mind and they're kind of big enough picture that you can't look at one piece of code and what you should do so we do need documentation but I think the argument is documentation is not a panacea it doesn't solve everything it it's not always the answer I noticed reach has not been answering a lot of questions you've been doing a lot of moderating and throwing out chopper chop so crack out an old chestnut that everyone can can answer current desktops you know to 3k Dae max what's rerun yeah all right there's a chick from time to time and changes from time to time okay you don't want to start so you know this is my badge though Vmax gifts I run a bunch of Trustee and I've switched between a number of different you know window managers but it actually you know a lot of my work is on embedded systems these days so most of the time my desktop is actually gonna scream and running gonna screen on a system that often the systems on another continent and so really the closest thing to a desktop I have at the moment is gonna screen Debian unstable xfce for and a lot of terminal windows I'm on Fedora 21 right now I'm actually known for being an oma heater I don't like some of the development models they have but I yeah I'm agno3 user with a couple of extensions to fix what I thought we're big failures and I don't believe in Emacs or VI so this is one editor that nobody sane would ever use but it's what I grew up with so I just fixed that a bug where it would crash if you had a big screen and more than a hundred twenty-eight lines on the screen that's the kind of crap around [Music] I run stocker Bunty on my desktop but my builder Shane is arch and and the other window manager that has is when I search in SSH - X otherwise it's all text I'm Dave Lane just have a question it's probably applies to all of you but I guess primarily for leanest in this case do you all see yourselves being at some point in your leadership roles use service by a computer and if so what kernel will it be running are you in your leadership role going to have that role usurped by the computer and if so which kernel will it be heard yeah I think my mind will be going before that happens but the argument there is when that happens and I don't know I think there is actually a partly serious answer and gift but that question and hacks back a little bit to some of the social interactions something I've noticed in recent times is processes for doing software development are becoming more mechanized and so the so often these days you know you're on you know github or you know --get aureus or whatever and it's like it's a pull request and it's just a patch and you respond there there's less social interaction you might as well be you know talking to a computer because it is getting more and more mechanised that process and I think that feeds into you know I've never seen any you know really heated discussions in a pull request chat and so it is sort of moving to be a more mechanized process and you know being more computerized in your way so if I end up being replaced by a computer I don't actually sort of care on some level as long as it's running free software yeah [Applause] Hey my name is Laura Bell especially my first time at LCA cool [Applause] as a security specialist and while security bugs have always historically been found in linux on open-source products in the last 12 months the way they have reached the world through mainstream media has changed dramatically and you know our bash burgers of the last 12 months have kind of changed the way most people who don't think about security interact what are your predictions for security in the open source Linux space the next 12 months and which areas of code if you are going to go and look at one right now for vulnerability research which would you start with [Applause] Bitcoin I mean if you knew which piece of code to look at for security issues we wouldn't have the security vision this it's going to be something very obscure and stupid and it's going to be obvious in hindsight and people will say how did we ever miss that and that's but it's always going to be the security is just the hard problem well I think you're absolutely right and and this falls into another one of those I'm certainly not going to try and be very predictive categories I'm really pleased that at least part of the response to this sort of escalation or change in the way things are being reported and talked about over the last year or so is that there are some activities attempting the sort of shine more light on put more resources on some of the core elements of technology that we all depend on I'm free of course of things like the Linux Foundation quarry infrastructure initiative and so on I don't actually immediately know sort of how that's going but the idea that we're at least trying to figure out how to get more eyeballs on some of the things that we all agree are some of the most important elements of code in our infrastructure and that we found the corporate members of our extended community willing to ante up to help make that happen is is pretty cool and I hope that's a good stuff there's another thing that's been going on which I find personally very satisfying which is that people are less willing sometimes to kind of brush the problem under the mat and leave it up to benders and have disclosures like infinitely long disclosure times I'm a huge believer in in just disclosing still somewhat responsibly but security problems need to be made public and there are people who argue and have argued for decades that you never want to talk about security problems because that only helps the black hats and the fact is I think you absolutely need to report them and you need to report them in a reasonable timeframe or reasonable for the carnal security list is admittedly five working days which some people think is a bit extreme and in other projects it might be a month or a couple of months but that's still much better than the years and years of silence which we used to have [Applause] so I'm gonna get the last question ah which is a real privilege just as one of the organising team as of now as of today and perhaps looking forward a little bit what you feel is your biggest legacy to the open source movement that posting about the first release of Linux or the momentum the caused you to release it or something else me personally quite yeah I actually think one of the things that I linux has been really good at and I'm and this is going to raise the few hackles right I I like open source and I like this whole working to that together with commercial companies and this whole notion that you don't need to vilify people who also do closed source so for me personally one of the big things I'm happy about is that I was part of the group by me and Linux was a big example for the group who who tried to take and now this is one Trish will stand up and give the others answer who try to take this very [Music] you or us against the world approach to free software and made it more open not just a name but also in acceptable to people who done necessarily believe in our values but believe that our model is better and and that's to me something that that Linux was really instrumental II at the same time I'm really happy about getting to because I think it has spread more than than the kernel in some respects and and maybe I'll be remembered more for gift than Linux we'll see I would answer that on his behalf I think that the thing I think the long lens of history might find the most important is how both of those projects have positively impacted this notion that all of us as humankind working together collaboratively leads to better results than when we're all sort of hiding in separate corners and fighting and competing so we need to wrap up there but it's been a fantastic session and do you think that our panel has earned a chopper chopper great

Channel: Linux.conf.au 2015 -- Auckland, New Zealand

Views: 65,495

Rating: 4.8798585 out of 5

Keywords: lca, lca_2015

Id: bAop_8l6_cI

Length: 53min 48sec (3228 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I am so full of those feminists. They try to make some idiot issues out of thin air. There has not been any fucking equality issues before they came around. There has been lot respected female engineers all the time. Some of them has been showing the way our industry is going. It is sad good guy like Linus is harrased by those fucking retards. I wish I could hug Linus and tell how wonderful job he is doing. Lets hope they dont mentally exhaus Linus :(