Exclusive Linus Torvalds Video Interview

On the second day of the linux.conf.au held in Sydney - Australia, ZDNet Australia team made an interview with Linux's father, Linus Torvalds. In the interview, he revealed that he was surprised by the resilience of the 2.6 Linux kernel to "invasive" changes.

From the first interview: "One of the original worries was that we would not be able to make big

changes within the confines of the development model [�] I always said that if there is something so fundamental that everything will break then we will start at 2.7 at that point. We have been able to do fairly invasive things even while not actually destabilizing the kernel. It has surprised me and other people how well we have been able to do big changes that did not cause havoc."

In the second video interview, which is a bit longer than the first one, Linus says that sometimes the kernel development community can be "unfriendly" and it scares the new blood: "It's a lot harder to enter the kernel development process today than it was five or 10 years ago. Over the years, one of the sad parts is we have got so much better that it has raised the bar. There are no problems that the person can see as an obvious problem and an obvious solution. [...] We have had other issues. Sometimes the kernel community is not the friendliest community and I don't like that. It sometimes scares away people. That said � we do seem to have a lot of people who find it an exciting area and are not afraid of a bit of controversy on the kernel mailing list," said Linus Torvalds.

You can view the two interviews made by ZDNet Australia with Linus Torvalds here and here.