Linus Torvalds

And the argument in the essay was that the bazaar, against all expectations, was far better suited for the kind of creative work that produces innovative software.

Here's an excerpt from the essay describing the emergence of the most famous of all open source projects, Linux, started by Linus Torvald in the early 1990s, the operating system that would become the backbone of modern computing.

I believed that the most important software needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvald's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise.

No quiet, reverent cathedral building here.

Rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a giant babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches, aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites who take submissions from anyone, out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Listen, all right.

I'm just going to say really glad Linus is not going at that pace and that hard.

He seems like he's all in on being able to use AI tools, but it very much seems like there's a human in the loop.

Ah, for sure.

You can do a lot of things.

You can be very productive with it if... there's a human in a loop and is there to make sure that everything fits and that anything that needs to be rewritten can be rewritten and it's fully reviewed before it gets thrown onto the kernel.

But, and, and as far as I understand, um, uh, so to, to scale back really quickly, um, Linus had been working on an issue of essentially churn that you would have multiple threads looking at a single piece of like a file or something like that.

And things would just go very slowly.

Well, yep, 7.3 is out.

So Linus Torvalds released it on Sunday, October 18th, right on schedule.

And for Linus, on schedule was a small victory this time.

The week before release, Candidate 7 showed up about six hours late because Linus had been traveling to the Kernel Maintenance Summit and Linux Plumbers conference.