![]() With that age also comes experience and adeptness at separating hype from substance and consistently delivering exceptional code. That’s a demographic you’d expect to be maintaining Cobol, not an operating system that continues to be the heart of modern application development. During the next few years, some within the Linux kernel community will be 60 years old. So how have Torvalds and the Linux kernel community managed to interweave younger developers and their ideas with more established people and practices? Rust never sleepsĭespite the seeming perpetual youth of Linux adoption, the Linux kernel community hit AARP status a while back. ![]() That takes people skills, not just coding. “Maintainers are the ones who translate,” by which he means “the context, the reason for the code.” It’s hard because “people relationships are hard.” Maintaining parts of the Linux kernel, or any significant software, requires “a certain amount of good taste to judge other people’s code,” which can be partially “innate,” he says, “but a lot of it just takes practice… many years.”įor these reasons, “It’s hard to find maintainers it’s much easier to find developers.” Writing software isn’t as hard as incorporating software into larger, functional systems. To do this well requires more than just software development talent, Torvalds goes on. Complicating things, “We have a thousand people involved and they’re not the same thousand people.” Maybe half of those people will “send just one patch, and a lot of them never show up again.” Managing those thousands who return, as well as welcoming the thousands who “have something small they wanted to fix that they cared about,” takes a great deal of social skill. In the case of Linux, “We rely on literally thousands of people every single release,” says Torvalds. No software-and certainly no open source software-is ever just a lone programmer in front of a computer. “People are hard,” he says, but “code is easy.” “People seem to think that open source is all about programming,” Torvalds stresses, “but a lot of it is about communication.” For a demographic sometimes characterized as geeky hermits more comfortable with ones and zeroes than social engagement, this is an interesting insight. These are central to Linux’s success and, indeed, all successful software projects. He shared some of those lessons at the recent Open Source Summit in Japan.Īmong those lessons: figuring out how to collaborate with others and motivate contributors to ensure Linux keeps evolving. Instead, it’s a testament to some key lessons Torvalds has learned and applied for years. In the case of Linux, its ongoing relevance isn’t an accident. It’s rare for any software to remain relevant for a few years, much less a few decades. Surprisingly though, Linux, Torvalds’ earliest “hobby project,” arguably gains in importance each year, despite its age. Linus Torvalds has been working on Linux for 32 years, longer than many software developers have been alive.
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