Linus Torvalds about Linux and Git

this is such a stress on your software Linux is in millions of computers it probably powers much of the Internet and I think that there are like a billion and a half active Android devices out there your software is in every single one of them it's kind of amazing you you must have some amazing software headquarters driving all this that's what I thought and I was shocked when I saw your picture there I mean this is this is the Linux world headquarters yeah it really doesn't look like much and I have to say the most interesting part in this picture that people mostly react to is the walking desk it is the most interesting part in my office and I'm not actually using it anymore and I think the two things are related the way I work is I want to not have external simulation you can kind of see it on the the walls are this light green I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the wall it's it's like a calming color it's it's not something that really stimulates you what you can't sees the computer here you only see the screen but the main thing I worry about in my computer is it doesn't have to be big and powerful although I like that it really has to be completely silent right I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home and I don't do that my office is the most boring office you'll ever see and I sit there alone in the quiet if the cat comes up it sits in my lap and I want to hear the cat purring not the sound of the fans in the computer so this is astonishing because working this way you're able to run this this vast technology Empire it isn't so that's that's an amazing testament to the power of open source tell us how you got to understand open source and how it led to the development of Linux I mean I still work alone I mean don't really I work alone in my house often in my bathrobe when photographer shows up I dress up I have clothes on and that's how I've always worked I mean this was how I started Linux - I did not start Linux as a collaborative project I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself partly because I needed the end result but even more because I just enjoy programming so it was it was about the the end of the journey which 25 years later we still have not reached but it was really about the fact that I was looking for a project on my own and there was no open source really on my radar at all and what happened is the project grows and becomes something you want to show off to people right really and this is this is more of a wow look at what I did and trust me it was not that great back then I made it publicly available and he wasn't even open-source at that point at that point it was source that was open but there was no intention behind using the kind of open source methodology that we think of today to improve it it was more like look I've been working in this for half a year I'd love to have comments right and other people approached me I had a at the University of Helsinki I had a friend who was one of the open source it was called mainly free suffer back then and and he actually introduced me to the notion that hey let's that you can you can use these open-source licenses that had been around and and I thought about it for a while I was actually worried about the whole commercial interests coming in I mean that's that's one of the worries I think most people who start out have that they worry about somebody taking advantage of their work right and I decided what the hell right and and then at some point someone contributed some code that you thought wow that really is interesting I would not have thought of that this could actually improve this it didn't even start by people contributing code it was more that people started contributing ideas and just the fact that somebody else takes a look at your project and I'm sure it's true of other things too but it's definitely true in code is that somebody else takes an interest in your code looks at it enough to actually give you feedback and give you ideas which that was a huge thing for me I mean so I was 21 at the time so I was young but I'd already programmed for half my life basically and every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting started giving feedback on your code and even before they started giving code back that was I think one of the big moments where I said I love other people right don't get me wrong I'm actually not a people person right I am alright I I don't really love other people it's but I love computers I love interacting with other people are emailed because it kind of gives you that buffer but but I do love other people who comment and and get involved in in my project and made it so much more it was there a moment when you saw what was being built and it suddenly started taking off and you thought wait a sec there's actually could be something huge not just a personal project that I'm getting nice feedback on but a kind of an explosive development in the whole technology world not really I mean the big point for me really was not when it was becoming huge it was when it was becoming little right it the big point for me was not being alone and having ten maybe a hundred people being involved that was a big point then everything else was very gradual going from a hundred people to a million people is not a big deal to me well I mean maybe it is if you're if you want to sell your result that it's a huge deal don't get me wrong but if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project the big part was getting the community then the community grew gradually and there's actually not a single point where I went like wow that just took off because it I mean it took a long time relatively there so all the technologists I talked to really credit you with with massively changing their work and it's not just Linux it's this thing called git which is this management system for software development tell us briefly about that and your role in that so one of the issues we had and and this took a while to start to appear is when you when you grow from having ten people or a hundred people working on a project to having 10,000 people which I mean right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel where you have a thousand people involved in every single release and that's every two months roughly two or three months some of those people don't do a lot right there's a lot of people who make small small changes but to maintain this the scale changes how you have to maintain it and we went through a lot of pain and there are there are whole projects that do only source code maintenance and CVS is the one that used to be the most commonly used and I I hated CVS with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical and interesting and an everybody else hated and we were in this bad spot where we had thousands people who wanted to participate but in many ways I was the the kind of break point where I could not scale to the point where I could work on it with thousands of people so get as my second big project which is only created for me to maintain my first big project right and this is literally how I work is I don't I don't code for well I do code for fun but I want to code for something meaningful so every single project I've ever done has been something I need it and so really both both Linux and get kind of a rose almost as an unintended consequence of your desire not to have to work with too many people absolutely yes no no that's what's amazing yeah um I and yet you're the man who's transformed technology not just once but twice and we have to try and understand why it is like you've given us some clues but here's a picture of you as a kid you mentioned that you've been with with the Rubik's Cube you're you mentioned that you've been programming since you were like 10 or 11 off your life were you this sort of computer genius you know uber nerd were you the star at school who could do everything and what what were you like as a kid yeah I think I was the prototypical nerd I mean I was I was not a people person back then that's my younger brother I was clearly more interested in the Rubik's Cube than my younger brother right my younger sister who's not in the picture when we had family meetings and it's not a huge family but I have like a couple of cousins she would prep me beforehand like before I stepped into the room she was there okay that's so-and-so right that's because I was not I was saying I was a geek I was a into computer so I was saying to math I was into physics I was good at that I'm lame I don't think I was particularly exceptional apparently my sister said that my Vegas exceptional quality was that I would not let go right I would okay so let's let's go that because that's interstate you would not let go so so that's not about being a geek and being smart that's about being stubborn that's not being stubborn in this but like just saying starting something and not saying okay I'm done let's do something else look shiny and I noticed that in many other parts in my life to that I lived in Silicon Valley for seven years and I worked for the same company in Silicon Valley for the whole time that is unheard of right that's not how Silicon Valley works the whole point of Silicon Valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot and and it's not the kind of person I am but during the actual development of enix itself that that stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people we talk about that a bit like that was that essential to sort of maintain the quality of what was being built how would you describe what happened I don't know if it's essential going back to there I'm not a people person sometimes I'm also shall we say myopic when it comes to other people's feelings and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people and I'm not proud of that right but at the same time it's I get people who tell me that I should be nice and then when I try to explain to them that maybe you're nice maybe you should be more aggressive they see that as me being not nice and we're all what I'm trying to say is we are different I'm not a people person it's not something I'm particularly proud of but it's part of me and one of the things I really like about open-source is it really allows different people to work together we don't have to like each other and sometimes we really don't like each other really I mean there are very very heated argument but you can actually you can find things that you don't you don't even agree to disagree it's just that you're interested in really different things and coming back to the point where I said earlier that always I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of your work it turned out and very quickly turned out that those commercial people were lovely lovely people and they all the things that I was not at all interested in doing and they had completely different goals and they used open source in ways that I just did not want to go but because it was open source they could do it and it actually works really beautifully together and I actually think it works the same way you need to have the people people that communicators that the warm and friendly people who like but really you want to hug you and get you into the community but that's not everybody and that's not me right I care about the technology there are people who care about the UI I can't do UI to save my life I mean if I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that Island was to make a pretty UI I died there so there's different kinds of people and okay I'm not making excuses I'm trying to explain now when we talked last week though you talked about some some other trait that that you had which I found really interesting it's this idea called taste and I've just got a couple of images here now apparently I think this is an example of not particularly good taste in code and and and this one is better taste which as one can immediately see what is the difference between these two so this is how many here are actually have coded right Oh Mike okay so I guarantee you everybody who raised their hand they have done what's called a singly linked list and it's taught this the first not very good taste approach is basically how it's thought to be done when you start out coding and you don't have to understand the code the most interesting part to me is the last if statement because what happens in a singly linked list when you this is trying to remove an existing entry from a list and there's a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle because if it's the first entry you have to change the pointer to the first entry if it's in the middle you have to change that pointer of a previous entry so there are two completely different cases and that's better and this is better it does not have they've statement and it doesn't really matter too I mean I don't want you to understand why it doesn't have the statement but I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case and that's good code and and but this is a simple code this is cs101 this is not important although details are important to me that really the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste which is how I sent you this stupid example that is not relevant because it's too small good taste is much bigger than this good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things okay so we're putting the pieces together here now you had you have taste in a way that's meaningful to software people you're you're a computer I think it was meaningful to some people here you are a very smart computer coder and your hellish stubborn but there must be something else I mean you've changed the future you must have this grant these velocity of these grand visions of the future you're a visionary right so I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at Ted for the last two like days because there's a lot of vision going on right and I am NOT a visionary I do not have a five-year plan I'm an engineer and I think it's really I mean I'm perfectly happy with all the people who walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and say I want to go there but I'm looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in right this is the kind of person I am okay so you you spoke to me and I'll speak about about these two guys who are they and had you read to them well so this is kind of cliche in technology the whole Tesla versus Edison where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man and people love Tesla I mean there are people who name their companies after it the other person there is is Edison who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and and is I mean he's most famous quote is genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and I mean the Edison camp even if people don't always like him because if you actually compare the two Tesla has kind of this mind grabbed these days but who actually changed the world Edison may not have been a nice person he did a lot of things he he was maybe not so intellectual not so visionary but I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla so a theme at Ted this week is is dreams big bold audacious dreams you're really the I'm up to that I'm trying to dial it down a bit yes it's there we embrace you we embrace you companies like Google and many others have made argue be like billions of dollars out of your software does that piss you off no no I mean it doesn't piss me off for several reasons and one of them is I'm doing fine right I'm really doing fine but the other reason is I mean without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing Linux would never have been what it is and I it's it's broad experiences I don't really enjoy public talking but at the same time this is an experience trust me right so there's a lot of things going on that makes me a very happy man and and thinking I did the right choices it's the open source idea and this is I think will end here is Oh sauce idea fully realized now in the world or is there more that it could go there more things that it could do so I'm of two minds there I think one reason open-source works so well in encode is that at the end of the day code tends to be somewhat black and white there's often in fairly good way to decide this is done correctly and this is not done well right code either works or it doesn't which means that there's less room for arguments and we have arguments despite this right in many other areas I mean people have talked about open politics and things like that and it's really hard sometimes to say that yes you can apply the same principles in some other areas just because it's the black and white turns into not just gray but different colors right so obviously open source in in science is making a comeback science was there first but then science ended up being pretty closed with very expensive journals and some of some of that going on and an open source is making a comeback in science with things like our Q of X and then an open journals Wikipedia changed the world to write so there are other examples I'm sure there are more to come but but I'm not saying you're you're not a visionary and said it's not up to you to name them no it's up to you guys to make them right exactly linus torvalds thank you for linux thank you for the internet thank all those Android phone thank you for coming here prepared and revealing a comic feel thank you oh it's really really

Channel: Paul G.

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Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2016