Linus Torvalds Explains How Linux Still Surprises and Motivates Him

A few weeks ago I started a simple open source project that got a little bit of traction over here in HN. Since then I've had 4-5 active volunteers contributing to the project and I'm ever so thankful for them. But I've got to admit, even 4-5 active volunteers is quite taxing on my time: I need to spend a fair bit of time reviewing stuff, triaging issues, updating the README or the code to be more newcomer friendly and what not.

I can't even imagine that in a 1000x scale, which is what Linus has done (I know that he has people working under him taking care of certain sections of the kernel, but it's still incredible how he has managed so many people, companies and organizations for so long so efficiently). Linux will always be one of the greatest man-made efforts ever.

Linus never ceases to inspire me - he says so much so casually: "If you can be part of a community and set up patches, ... You’ll have to spend a certain amount of time to learn a project, but there’s a huge upside -- not just from a career aspect, but having an amazing project in your life.”

> For the first 3 to 4 years, the complaint about Git was it was so different and hard to use. About 5 years ago something changed

It's still hard to use IMHO, once you deep dive into it, the complexity start to rise up to the point where a complete reset of the repo is required but anyway "what changed" is that Google Code close and suddenly every svn backed project looked for alternatives, the easiest one being "git" since it has a compat API for svn repos, later Jr's started learning git at school and ditched svn et al and now everyone chooses git for default, not because its great, but because everyone is using it and GitHub exploded in popularity due to "social coding" being the norm.

  >> The 2-3 weeks I worked on Git to get that started for example. 

His side-project, kicked-off in 2-3 weeks :). This would be a lifetime project for most people.

It is GNU/Linux, also happy to know his sweet talk with VMware Head of (stealing) Open Source. Gold Linus foundation member status makes friendship and magic.