Ask HN: Is Linus Torvalds a Great Man of History?

No one has mentioned git yet.

It depends on what you think of as great, but the man has developed two of the biggest software items in the world. One that runs the entire internet, and one that runs most software development.

Just about everything, ever, that any given person has done, would have been done by someone else. Sure we'd be on bsd. Or we'd be using subversion or mercurial. Without Einstein, the same truths about physics exist and would eventually be discovered.

I don't know how you define great, But in terms of good for society, and breadth of impact, I have trouble imagining anyone who's done more in recent times

We would probably be using one of the BSDs. However, it is better to look at it in reality: Torvalds did the hard part, which is getting there first.

His biggest contribution is actually in maintaining and growing his project into the huge thing it has become today. What would have stopped the continued fragmentation in the BSDs had they carried the day? Yes, Linux distributions are quite fragmented, but most of them run the same kernel (now-defunct mkLinux ca. 2002 aside).

> a Great Man of History

Really depends on how many of these awards you’re handing out. My guess is of all the people in the world who have been born in the past century, he’d be “ranked” somewhere in the ones-of-millions? Maybe if you’re being super generous you could make a case for him in the hundreds-of-thousands?

Torvalds? No. Jon Von Neumann? Yes.

I’d say with Linux and Git under his belt he’s undeniably on the level of Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Dave Cutler etc. Now the real question is do any of them qualify as “great men” since their accomplishments, while prolific, are kinda unknown to the general populace

I sat down briefly with Jon 'Maddog' Hall[0] in Taipei in 2001, where Computex was about to happen. He had retired from his position as a career technical executive at Digital and was enjoying very much touring the world in shorts, beard and sandals promoting Linux and open source. I had interviewed him a year earlier in Sydney and we ran in to each each other by mistake. I was a young kid sourcing hardware for building embedded Linux PC104 systems. The key thing he said to me was that Linux was going to dominate embedded. How right he was.

2004: Ubuntu initial release.

2005: Maemo (Linux kernel) appeared in Nokia.

2007: iPhone (also unix kernel) appeared and Nokia (prior incumbent) peaked.

2008: Android (Linux kernel) appeared.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)

In the early 1990s, when Linus Torvalds got started, BSD was tied up in a lawsuit, and Minix was under a restrictive license. Torvalds himself has said that if those legal issues around BSD and Minix didn't exist, he probably would have focused on improving one of them rather than starting his own system from scratch. And BSD's issues were legally resolved by a settlement in 1994, but by then Linux was already well underway. If the legal situation had been different, Linux probably would have never happened.

There were *BSD flavors before there was Linux; what made Linux more successful was more than just that it was "a free Unix". There will be lots of debate for years about what exactly those things were, which will ensure Linus Torvalds enduring fame and gratitude.

Which, to be explicit, I think he's earned. As have the hundreds of others who have worked to make "free Unix" into "ubiquitous Unix," who for various reasons will never get the recognition they deserve.

He deserves a lot of recognition but only time will tell. It does not seem so now but Linux could disappear and just be a blip in history.

I think he does not get enough recognition from the big tech companies. He has saved them billions in costs. I would even say that some of the giants might not have even been able to start without his contribution to IT. I hope they start to realize that and make a point of saying so.

Yes he is. It is hard to pin down why Linux is so much more successful than BSD and others. But it is not entirely an accident. And it is entirely possible that if Linux wasn't around, Windows could have been the default server OS today. We may never know how alternative universes may have played out. But we do know how things worked out in the current universe and we have Torvalds to thank for it.

I’m not an expert in this, but I think the concept of a “great man of history” is controversial in the sense that some people think great men of history simply don’t exist; that history follows a specific path for reasons beyond individual control. In this case, one would argue that if Linus Torvalds didn’t do what he did, someone else would have and the world would be mostly the same. It’s hard to be sure about these counterfactuals and I think for most “Great Men of History” you could make the same generic argument. However, Linus did do it, so I guess whether he’s a Great Man of History depends on whether you accept the Great Men of History theory in general.

On the other hand, if you’re stingy enough to say that someone can’t be a Great Man of History unless you can definitely show that no one else in their place would have done the same thing, then I think some people have a stronger case than him. For instance, to my understanding, Winston Churchill was notorious prior to WWII for being an incorrigible warmonger who wasn’t willing to be “reasonable” about Nazi Germany. I think it’s likely that without him, whoever else was PM would have sued for peace after the fall of France. After all, you could name most of the people who probably would have been PM at the time, and as I recall, most of them did want to sue for peace at that time. I don’t want to get into a tangential debate about Churchill here—“Great Man of History” refers to magnitude of impact and not moral goodness. My point is, Churchill is the kind of person you point to as strong evidence for the theory of Great Men of History in the first place. Linus doesn’t have that strong of a case.

What defines someone as a great person of history rather than simply someone of note. History is better kept so we can likely guarantee attribution in the future, but I think being a great person of history means that person is someone you can aspire to and is generally known by the populace outside of their specific "trade". I think Torvalds is someone of note. I doubt he, just like other people in computer science will be remembered generally as time goes on. People will likely learn the names as part of some curriculum and soon be relegated to the annals of computer science as we continue to advance technology. That's just my opinion. We will only know in time.

Linus was the a suitable person at a specific time with a "good enough" idea.

It's a bit of a challenge to take him out of historical context and ignore the rest of the Unix pantheon, RMS, Tanenbaum, and even Microsoft as the "Bond villain" that made it all happen.

Torvalds is an atom that looms large in a substantial chemical reaction.

GNUHerd is interesting in this context, because it highlights the strongest reason to regard Linus as "great": leadership.

Technical excellence is necessary, but not sufficient. The reaction requires a catalyst to complete.

So, if one deems it important to work the definition of "great" to include Linus, then, sure.

The most viable linux alternative is probably BSD. If Linux did not exist, there would probably be a lot more BSD distributions and software.

Torvalds deserves a lot of credit, but he is not necessarily a linchpin of FOSS computing.

We need to give credit were credit is due. Torvalds deserves it, not because of all the code the he wrote, it was not that much and many others could have done the same, but the process that he developed was (and still is, the key). He managed to get together the hacking community AND the industry. Think about all the work involved in merging features and fixes: gazillions of patches. From this work, git was also born and again the genius in Torvalds knew that his job was done, he paved the way and promoted Junio Hamano to be its maintainer.

Who else is in that list of great men? The definition of the list may say if he belongs to it or not, or at least if he deserves to be there as much as some of its members.

Great man? Meh, just persevering engineering. Should that be in the history books, sure.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

When I think of a great man of history I tend to get an idea of someone who did or made a singular thing that has greatly advanced the species. For example, Alan Turing pioneered modern computing. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb (this may be debatable but just for the sake of example). Sir Tim Berners Lee "invented" the [HTTP] internet.

In this context, what is the thing Linus Torvalds created? The... server?

There were (and are) other free/libre Unix variants. Perhaps one of them would be where Linux is today.

But regardless, it doesn't make Torvalds of particular historical note. Important in a specific narrow field, sure. Of general historical importance, no.