Linus' Lessons On Software Dev Management 132
Esther Schindler writes "In this interview with Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Linus Torvalds shares hard-won wisdom about managing software development projects, including encouraging community involvement, the importance of programming tools, and ensuring the project stays on track. For instance, regarding getting people to contribute to your project, he says, 'If you start off with some "kumba-ya feeling" where you think people from all the world are going to come together to make a better world by working together on your project, you probably won't be going very far.'"
The GPL and Linux rock! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's really great, this whole Linux and GNU thing! Even if Linus isn't about kumba-ya, (Although he is, and one day he will rip his disguise off and laugh like a super-villain to reveal a t-shirt with the hammer and sickle. Mark my words, he's a closet commie, right in our midst.) ...whoa that was a long winded parenthesis. What I was going to say, was that the ingenious thing about this whole FOSS thing is that it is a building block of future anarcho-socialist utopia and at the same time the greedy capitalists can not help but contributing, since it is in their shorter term self interest. But the day will come when the people will truly be masters of the world, each and every one and computing will be a significant part of how we will do it.
Sincerelly,
Future person.
~
~
(Or did I dream it?)
Re:Kumba ya? (Score:0, Interesting)
Frankly, if we had any principles, we should abandon linux (the kernel.) That guy is an amoral bastard. I shiver thinking what he could do with political power...
Re:Kumba ya? (Score:4, Interesting)
How is he out of touch with reality? Really, an explanation would be handy to go with the accusation.
Re:Fighting Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
I once told a microsoft tech rep that the purpose of Linux was to make Windows better.
Re:Kumba ya? (Score:4, Interesting)
All credit to RMS for the license and making projects use it, but the projects themselves succeeded because they're run by people like Linus. The GNU Hurd failed and the GCC was upsurped by the EGCS fork and then conveniently renamed back to GCC after the FSF admitted their project was going nowhere. There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects, they implemented a lot of the command line tools and other simple things but their large projects flopped. If I was to take advice on running projects I'd listen to Linus any day.
That said, I think he's a little bit colored by developing a kernel and running servers where stability is a lot more important than in many other areas. On the desktop it's not that useful if I have a desktop that doesn't do what I want, no matter how stable it is at not doing it. I'm willing to be on the bleeding edge from time to time, as long as there's good communication on just how unstable it is (KDE4, I'm looking at you...)
Re:Kumba ya? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I got flamed a few weeks back for calling Linus the John Carmack of OSS (which is to say someone who did something revolutionary at one time, but has since mostly been riding reputation, rather than continuing to produce at the same level as in the past.)
Between the FSF and Linus there's been a continual cycle of breakage in APIs and ABIs across the system that make managing the software yourself without some form of package management and toolchain management basically impossible. Combined with a variety of gotchas in compiler/library options which can make your just updated system incompatible with the previously compiled binaries (rare today, but a common occurance when going from 2.0->2.1->2.2->2.3 series glibc, nevermind gcc 2.8.x->2.95->2.96->3.x->4.x compiler toolchains. Added to the old MAKEDEV->devfs->udev fiasco and you have a mess that's only been overlooked because almost nobody bothers to do it themselves, instead relying on distro maintainers to make sure packages JUST WORK, even when they really don't.
As someone who has been trying to put together legacy toolchains for the past few weeks to try and see how legacy code works, let me just say it really sucks ass.