CA: This is such a strange thing, your software Linux is in millions of computers, it probably powers much of the Internet, and I think that there are a billion ana a half active Andriod devices out there. Your software is in every single one of them. It's kind of amazing. You must have something amazing software headquaters driving all this. That's what I thought--and I was shocked when I saw a picture of it. THis is the LInux world headquaters.总部
LT: It really doesn't look like much.And I have to say , the most intersting part in the picture is that people mostly react to, is the walking desk. It is the most interesting part in my office and I am not actually using it anymore. And I think the two things are related. The way I work is I want to not have external stimulation激励. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light-green. I am told that at mental institutions 精神病医院 they use that on the walls. It is like a calming color. It is not sth that really stimulate you. What you can't see is the computer here, you can only see the screen, the only thing I worried about is it doesnot have to be big and powerful, although I like that, it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google, they have their own small data center at home. I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. I sit there alone in the quiet, if the cat comes up, it sits on my lap, and I want to hear the cat purring(打呼噜). not the sound of the fans in the computer.
This is astonishing, because working this way,you're able to run this vast technology empire, it is an empire. That's an amazing testament to the power of open source. Tell us , how you got to understand open source and how it lead to the development of Linux.
I mean I still work alone in my house bus often in my bathrobe浴袍. When a photographer show up, I dress up, so I have clothes on. That's how I've always worked. I mean, this was how I started Linux, too. I did not start Linux as a collaborative project. I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at that time for myself, partly because I needed the end result, but even more because I just enjoyed programming. So it was about the end of the journey, which , 25 years later, we still have not reached.But it was really about the fact that I was looking for a project on my own, and there was no open source really, on my radar at all. And, what happens is, the project grows, and becomes sth you want to show off to people. Really, this is more of a 'wow, look at what I did'. Trust me, I was not that great back then. I made it publicly available. At that point, it was source that was open, but there was no intention behind using the kind of open-source methodology that we think of today. to improve it.It was more like, "Look, I have been working on this for half of a year, I'd love to have some comments", right. and other people approached me, At the University of Helsinki赫尔辛基大学，and I had a friend who was one of the open source, it was called mainly "free software" back then -- and he actually introduced me to the notion that, hey, you can use this open source license, it had been around. And I thought about if for a while, and I was actually worried about the whole commercial interests coming in. I mean that's one of the worries I think most people who start out have,and . They worried about somebody taking advantage of their work. I decided 'what the hell'.
And then at some point somebody contributed some code that you thought "wow, that really is interesting, I would not have thought of that, This could actually improve this.
it didn't even start by people contributing code, it was more that people started contributing ideas. And just the fact that somebody else takes a look at your project, and I'm sure it's true of other things, too. But it is definitely true in code-- is that somebody else takes an interest in your code, looks at it enough to give you feedback and give you ideas. That's a huge thing for me. I was 21 at that time, and I was young. But I .. half of my life. Projects before that are completely personal. time people start commenting, start giving feedback on your code, even before they give code back. that was a big moment when I said "I love other people". Don't give me wrong, I actually not a people person合群的人。I don't really love other people. I love computers. I love interact with people through email because it kind of gives you that buffer. I do love people who comments and get involved in my project and made it so much more.
Was there a moment you thought it built "this can be huge not just a project, I can make "
The big point for me really not when it is becoming huge, but when it becomes little. The big moment for me is not being alone, maybe ten or 100 people getting involved, it was a big point. Then everything else was very gradual顺其自然。 Going from 100 people to a million people is not a big deal -- to me. If you want to sell your result then it's a huge deal--don't get me wrong. But if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project, the big part was getting the community. Then the community grew gradually. And there's actually not a single point where I went like "Wow, that just took off这事儿快成了" because it took a long time, relatively.
So all the technologists that I talk to really credit you with massively changing their work. And it's not just Linux, it's the thing called Git, which is this management system for software development. Tell us briefly about it and your role in that.So one of the issues we had, and this took a while to start to appear, is when you grow from having 10 people or 100 people working on a project to having 10,000 people, which I mean, right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel, we have 10,000 people involved in every single release and that's every two months, roughly two or three months. Some of those people don't do a lot. There's a lot of people who make small, small changes.
but to maintain this, the scale changes how you have to maintain it. And we went through a lot of pain, and there are whole projects that do only source-code maintainence. CVS is the one that used to be the most commonly used, and I hated CVS with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical 基础的 and interesting and everybody else hated. And we were in this bad spot, 僵局 where we had thousands of people who wanted to participate, but in many ways, I was the kind of break point where I could not scale to the point where I could work with thousands of people. So Git is my second big project which was only created for me to maintain my first big project. And this is literally how I work. I don't code for .. I do code for fun but I want to code for sth meaningful so every single project I've ever done has been sth I needed.
So really, both Linux and Git kind of arose almost as an unintended consequence 意想不到的偶然 of your desire not to have to work with too many people.
Absolutely. yes.
And yet, you're the man who's transformed technology not just once but twice, and we have to try and understand why it is. You've given us some clues, but here's a picture of you as a kid, with a Rubik's cube魔方。 You mentioned that you've been programming since you were like 10 or 11, half your life. Were you this sort of computer genius. What were you like as a kid?
Yeah, I think I was the prototypical nerd.宅男原型。 I was not a people person back then. That's my younger brother. I was clearly more interesting in the Rubik's cube魔方 than my younger brother. My younger sister, who's not in the picture, when we had family meetings, and it's not a huge family, but I have, like, a couple of cousins -- she would prep me beforehand提前打预防针。Like before I stepped into the room she would say, "Ok. That's so-and-so..". Because I was not.. I was a geek. I was into computers. I was into math, I was into physics物理，I was good at that. I don't think I was particularly exceptional.出类拔萃的地步。Apparently, my sister said that my biggest exceptional quality 最突出的品质 was that I would not let go。就是不放弃
Let's go there, because that's interesting. You would not let go. So that's not about being a geek and being smart. that's about being stubborn.
LT: That's about being stubborn.That's about like just starting sth and not saying "OK, I'm done, let's do sth else..Look:shiny!" I notice that in many other parts in my life, too. I lived in Silicon Valley for seven years. And I worked for the same company, in Silicon Valley for the whole time.
That is unheard of.闻所未闻。 That is not how Silicon Valley works. The whole point of Silicon Valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot. And that's not the kind of person I am.
CA: But during the actual development of Linux itself, the stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people. Talk about that a bit. Was that essential to sort of maintain the quality of what was being built? How would you describe what happened?
LT: I don't know if it's essential. Going back to the "I'm not a people person", sometimes I'm also "myopic" when it comes to other people's feelings.不太理解别人的感受 and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people. And I'm not proud of that. But at the same time, it's I get people who tell me that I should be nice. And then when I try to explain to them that maybe you're nice, maybe you should be more aggressive, they see that as me being not nice. What I'm trying to say is we are different. I'm not a people person; it's not sth I'm particularly proud of, but it's part of me. And one of the things I really like about open source is it really allows different people to work together. We don't have to like each other and sometimes we really don't like each other. Really--there are very, very heated arguments吵得不可开交；But you can, actually, you can find things that you don't even agree to disagree甚至都没法同意保留不同意见，it's just that you're interested in really different things. And coming back to the point where I said earlier, that I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of your work, it turned out, and very quickly turned out, that those commercial people were lovely, lovely people. And they did all the things that I was not at all interested in doing,他们做那些我不感兴趣的事，and they had completely different goals关注点与我完全不同。And they used open source in ways that I just did not want to go.他们使用开源软件的方法跟我不一样。But because it was open source they could do it, and it actually works really beautifully together. And I actually think it works the same way. You need to have the people-people合群的人, the communicators, the warm and friendly people who really want to hug you and get you into the community. But that's not everybody, and it's not me. I care about the technology, there are people who care about the UI. I can't do UI to save my life. 我死也做不来用户界面。I mean , if I was stranded on an island,我被困在一个孤岛上 and the only way to get off that island was to make a pretty UI, I'd die there.
So there's different kind of people and I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain.
CA: Now, when we talked last week, you talked about some other trait that you have, which I found really interesting. It's the idea called taste.
I think this is an example of not particularly good taste in code,and this one is better taste.what is the difference between these two?
LT: How many people here actually have coded? So I guarantee you, everybody who raised their hands they have done what's called a singly-linked list.单向链表。This，the first not very good taste approach, is basically how it's taught to be done when you start out coding. And you don't have to understand the code. The most interesting part to me is the last if statement. Because what happens in a singly-linked list that is trying to remove an existing entry from a list and there is a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle.
Sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case. That is CS 101. That is not important--although, details are important. To me, the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste, which is how ..Good taste is much bigger than this. Good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things.甚至有一种直觉，知道怎么把事情做得漂亮。
CA：So we're putting the pieces together here now. You have taste in a way that's meaningful to software people.
LT: I think it's meaningful to some people here.
CA: You're a very smart computer coder, and you're hellish stubborn. But there must be sth else, I mean, you've changed the future. You must have the ability of these grand visions of the future.你一定有实现未来宏伟愿望的能力。You're visionary, right?有远见的人
LT：I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I'm not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer.
And I'm perfect happy with all the people who are walking around and just starting at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying "I want to go there"。But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in.That's the kind of person I am.他们行走四方，仰望苍穹，看着满天星辰说“我想到那儿去。”我只想填好眼前这个坑,不让自己掉进去.
CA: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them?
LT: Well, so this is kind of cliche in technology.老故事 the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian经常被嘲笑说他是一个单调乏味的人，and his most famous quote is, Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. I am the Edison kind, although people always don't like him. Because if you actually compare the two, Tesla has kind of this mind grab these days, but who actually changed the world? Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things -- he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. But I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla.
CA:So our theme at TED this week is dreams -- big, bold, audacious dreams.
LT: I'm trying to dial it down a bit,我会试着收敛一些。
CA: We embrace you, we embrace you.我们接受你，我们爱你。Companies like Google and many others have made, argubly, like, billions of dollars out of your software.用你的软件挣了非常多的钱。Does that piss you off?你会觉得不爽吗？
LT：No, it doesn't piss me off for several reasons. And one of them is, I'm doing fine.我过得不错。I'm really doing fine. But the other reason is, I mean, without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing, 如果我不将它开源，而过于纠结的话，Linux would never have been what it is. And it's brought experiences I don't really enjoy, public talking, but at the same time, this is an experience. Trust me. So there's a lot of things going on that make me a very happy man and I think I did the right choices.
CA: Is the open source idea fully realized now in the world or is there more that it could go, are there more things that it could do?
LT: I'm of two minds there. I think one reason open source works so well in code is that in the end of the day, code tends to be somewhat black and white. There is often a fairly good way to decide, this is done correctly and this is not done well. Code either works or it doesn't.代码要么运行成功，要么失败。 which means there is less room for arguments. And we have arguments despite this, right?