{"id":78,"date":"2019-04-28T15:23:55","date_gmt":"2019-04-28T19:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/?p=78"},"modified":"2019-04-28T15:23:55","modified_gmt":"2019-04-28T19:23:55","slug":"reading10-sympathy-for-the-devil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/2019\/04\/28\/reading10-sympathy-for-the-devil\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading10: Sympathy for the Devil"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Linus Torvalds is a success. He began one of the biggest operating systems in the world. Considering his competition is with the likes of Microsoft and Apple, that is incredible. What he began all those years ago still competes with some of the biggest companies in the world today. While that is definitely true, he seems to have stumbled into success. Torvalds is and has always been a programming genius, but he never cared about business. A prime example of this was when the man from boston trademarked Linux and attempted to use it to make money off of Linux companies. Torvalds was totally unprepared for this. He only thought about the programming. He was still working his way through school, and working on Linux in his free time, he never considered someone essentially attempting to make money off his work in this type of way. In true Torvalds fashion the solution was too look to the community. They ended up gathering money through the community to fight the trademark. This is probably the biggest difference between Torvalds and any of the big software companies. He leans on the community to create his work, where the companies traditionally just work on it internally and then send it out when they\u2019re ready to make money. Torvalds is the poster child for the potential of open source, but I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ll ever see anything quite like it again. To get that level of success in open source, to create that kind of community required a very specific kind of person. Torvalds is criticised for being very short with people, for being extremely critical and inflammatory, however he still looks to people for the community. The openness of the community is what is important to him. He doesn\u2019t care about trying to make money, about trying to create the next big product. It takes a person who doesn\u2019t care about these things, but also has the technical ability to follow through and create these great projects, to have an open source success story like Torvalds. The probability of that happening again are not likely. While Torvalds definitely shows the power and the potential of open source, he also shows the requirements. Torvalds doesn\u2019t operate like a business person, because he\u2019s not. He works like a hacker from one of the earlier books we read this semester. He lives and breaths programming. He works on something because he\u2019s interested in it. He doesn\u2019t work a nine to five shift. He programmes all the time, because that\u2019s what he loves, and what he wants to do. He doesn\u2019t work in a good business model because that doesn\u2019t work for him. To have someone that meets all of those requirements and also doesn\u2019t want to have a get rich quick scheme as part of their work, is very rare and very unlikely to be seen again. There are a lot of circumstances that led to Torvalds becoming what he is today, but perhaps the biggest this was his personality. While there is more support for an open source community today, there is also much more obvious and easier paths to monetary reward for code. Overall, I never expect to see a story like Linus again. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Linus Torvalds is a success. He began one of the biggest operating systems in the world. Considering his competition is with the likes of Microsoft and Apple, that is incredible. What he began all those years ago still competes with some of the biggest companies in the world today. While that is definitely true, he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[333393],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cse-40842-hackers-in-the-bazaar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/paul-githens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}