14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds, often called the father of Linux, discussed his role as a kernel maintainer in a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, VMware's vice president and chief open source officer, at the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference: Europe.
And while many people believe that Torvalds spends most of the time coding because, you know, this is what kernel updates are all about, this isn’t necessarily what he’s doing.
In fact, Torvalds reveals that he’s no longer coding at all, and he spends most of the time in the email app. This is also where he typically writes some code, but it’s not exactly what you think.
“I read email, I write email, I do no coding at all anymore,” he says.
“Most of the code I write, I actually write inside my mail reader. So somebody sends me a patch, or more commonly they send me a pull request or there's a discussion about the next pull request, and there's something I react to and say, 'No, this is fine, but...' And I send out pseudocode, or — I'm so used to sending out patches that I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever compiled it, ever tested it, because I literally wrote it in the mail reader, and saying 'I think this is how it should be done.' But this is what I do. I'm not a programmer anymore.”
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Torvalds, who emphasizes that the world of open source is first and foremost based on communication, says that keeping the conversations active via email is essential.
And this is exactly why he’s trying to be so active on email, explaining that in some cases, his job is just to say no.
“I read a lot more email than I write, because what my job really is — in the end, my job is to say no. Somebody has to be able to say no to people. Because other developers know that if they do something bad, I will say no. They hopefully, in turn, are more careful. But in order to be able to say no, I have to know the background. Because otherwise I can't do my job. So I spend all my time, basically, reading email about what people are working on... It is an interesting job, but you do end up spending most of your time reading email,” he says.
Linus Torvalds has recently revealed that he gave up on Intel after no less than 15 years, with his computer now running on AMD hardware. A switch to ARM hasn’t been ruled out in the future, but of course, this is something that just can’t happen overnight.
The full keynote conversation between Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, and Dirk Hohndel, VP & Chief Open Source Officer, VMWare, can be watched in the video below.
