19 Jan
2023
19 Jan
'23
9:23 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 08:20:16AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 8:04 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Linus was in charge because he started it. At least 30 years ago I said
"He's good programmer, a good architect, and a good manager. I've never
seen that in one person before".
He most certainly did not write the whole thing but he decided what went
in when. He's quite good at that.
I had already been using Linux for a while by
then I believe. I used
it before it had networking.
Pretty early on I got to be friends with Linus and was really impressed
with his leadership. That's what sold me on Linux, he was the thing
that was missing in the BSD world. If someone like him had appeared
and unified the BSD world I think we'd all be running BSD.
By the time even 4.3BSD was released, there were dozens of people that
could work on the kernel at a high level of skill. There was no one person
who created it who could have the gravitas to pull that off. Let alone a
decade later when it was freed up, by then there were hundreds. The
dynamics of the situation were quite different: Linus always was in charge
because he wrote the whole thing... BSD was a victim of it's own success
in the 80s and 90s in a way...