Harsh, perhaps (a function of his brutal honesty). But, I don't think you would find more than 1 out of 10 people who would agree with you that he's selfish. He did license the linux kernel via the GPL, and, he's dedicated pretty much his entire software to writing software that you can freely copy, modify, and distribute.
tl;dr:
Linus doesn't read kernel patches anymore, because subsytem maintainers do and just send him a summary. He's been working with them for about 10 years, so he trusts them. Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person.
First of all, it's a direct quote from the article. Second, I think some people (like you) object to any attention-grabbing headline, for no reason at all. It was a good article, and that was a good quote to use to get people to click and read.
I can't even imagine how terrible Hacker News would be if all the titles were like what one of the people who responded to your comment said:
"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"
This is a drab, dull, and terrible headline.
I think that's unfair. If an attention grabbing headline is deceptive but leads to a good article, it's still deceptive.
The quality of a headline has nothing to do with attention-grabbiness; it's a good headline if I can read it and know whether I'm interested in the contents. To optimize for attention-grabbiness over helpfulness is to defect in the HN posting game.
"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"
tl;dr for your tl;dr:
Linus Torvalds is, in fact, a good manager.
> Now people are taking adding a USB device for granted, but realistically that did not use to be the case. That whole being able to hotplug devices, we've had all these fundamental infrastructure changes that we've had to keep up with.
Did anyone else notice this? In the last ~5 years, half a decade, we went from every major OS crashing on hot swaps or usb plugins or not recognizing devices or other crippling issues on hot swapping almost any hardware, to being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms.
That is really amazing tech, and in this era of touch phones and web apps, we are still having huge leaps at the lowest levels of usability.
> being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms
Are we really at that point? I know you can swap USB devices and even hard disks, but I thought that unplugging almost anything inside the computer would lock it up?
This has been true on pretty much every release of OS X Lion 10.7. Every two-three months I drop in a new driver from the FTDI site, and upgrade to a new patch of Lion - but both devices continue to sporadically black-screen me.
Every time I pull out a USB cable/Plug it it it's like I'm rolling dice.
The FTDI drivers on Windows XP are pretty mature (I've never had a crash on that platform), and I think they're built into recent releases of the Linux kernel - and I've heard no complaints there (or experienced them myself)- so, perhaps this is actually proving your point somewhat.
We still have a ways to go before we experience 5 9s reliability on USB Hot Plug though...
No problems on Windows, and yes, the ftdi_sio module has been a part of the Linux source tree for quite some time (even OpenBSD has an FTDI driver).
Is that the HM65 chipset in that notebook? I have a Ivy Bridge CPU on the HM77 chipset and I had initially some problems with the scaling not working correctly but after a few reboots cpupower has worked without ever having a problem anymore...
What custom filesystem is he referring to? Does anyone know?
I felt kind of ripped off too when I got to that part. Again, it betrays the trust of Linus, who gave his time to do the interview, and the reader, who gave of their time to read it.
