The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him - Bloomberg Business

Catching up with Linus Torvalds

"It’s weird that a person who can come off as a real grouch has managed to be such a supremely effective dictator. Linux was once 10,000 lines of code and required part-time tending. It’s now 19 million lines of code, and changing it involves a complex hierarchy. In an average year, more than 3,000 people will offer at least one change for the heart of Linux, known as the kernel. The change could be as simple as fixing a spelling error or something more complex, such as code for a specialized supercomputing operation. There are around 700 “maintainers,” who first gather and peruse those changes and move them on to 130 “subsystem maintainers,” who discuss the software on mailing lists. Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is Torvalds’s right-hand man, can receive upwards of 1,000 e-mails a day from Linux developers debating the merits of the various tweaks. After all this discussion is done and the code is tested and perfected, Torvalds is finally notified that someone would like to make a change to Linux."

The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him - Bloomberg Business