tag archive: linus torvalds

Glyn Moody points to Simon Willison pointing to an old 2001 post by Linus Torvalds. An oldie but a goodie, I’m including it here for greater memory permanence.

In response to a comment that “Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems to be making progress through sheer luck,” Linus writes:

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!

You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what – it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.

It’s you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design.

Right. “Sheer luck.”

Well, sheer luck, AND:

Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of “source code,” although biologists call it DNA.

A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this “survival of the fittest”).

Massive undirected parallel development …

Just for FunLinus Torvalds

Welcome to my inaugural minimalist review. I recently finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. “The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” Now it’s time to blurt out a few comments.

(Remember: minimalist may refer to the small amount of substantive content rather than the word count. As often happens, I may have hidden some catchier stuff at the end: Pragmatism, Idealism, and Revolution.)

I have mixed feelings about doing reviews. Who am I to criticize anything? Well, I’m certainly not especially qualified, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion, right?

I enjoyed the book. I like computer “history” books; finding out about the people behind the technology and how they went about doing their thing, and there was a good dose of that with this book. …