Linus Torvalds took to the stage in China for the first time Monday at LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China in Beijing. In front of a crowd of nearly 2,000, Torvalds spoke with VMware Head of Open Source Dirk Hohndel in one of their famous “fireside chats” about what motivates and surprises him and how aspiring open source developers can get started. Here are some highlights of their talk.
What’s surprising about Linux development
“What I find interesting is code that I thought was stable continually gets improved. There are things we haven’t touched for many years, then someone comes along and improves them or makes bug reports in something I thought no one used. We have new hardware, new features that are developed, but after 25 years, we still have old, very basic things that people care about and still improve.”
What motivates him
“I really like what I’m doing. I like waking up and having a job that is technically interesting and challenging without being too stressful so I can do it for long stretches; something where I feel I am making a real difference and doing something meaningful not just for me.”
“I occasionally have taken breaks from my job. The 2-3 weeks I worked on Git to get that started for example. But every time I take a longer break, I get bored. When I go diving for a week, I look forward to getting back. I never had the feeling that I need to take a longer break.”
The future of Linux leadership
“Our processes have not only worked for 25 years, we still have a very strong maintainer group. We complain that we don’t have enough maintainers – which is true, we only have tens of top maintainers who do the daily work of merging stuff. That’s a strong team for an open source project. And as these maintainers get older and fatter, we have new people coming in. It takes years to go from a new developer to a top maintainer, so I don’t feel that we should necessarily worry about the process and Linux for the next 20 years.”