Linux Journal: Linus & the Lunatics, Part I

"Linus: As most of you probably already know, I hate giving talks... I expect this to be mostly a Q&A. But usually Q&As that start off cold don't work very well. So what I usually do for my Q&A is do a few slides. If the slides end up being interesting and I get questions on the slides, the slides can take up the whole thing. But that seldom happens because the slides tend to be boring.

"But I've noticed that I used to give a lot of talks about what's new in 2.6 kind of things, right? Or a few technical thoughts about some specific feature. And I decided I won't do that this time at all. Because I notice that what I'm not actually doing any more is coding... Since I'm still giving a talk about technical stuff, I decided that I might as well give a talk about managing stuff... a few slides on some of the issues that come up.

"I've really only got a few points on what really matters. Obviously, people--managing people, and having other people manage people for you--ends up being one of the more important parts. The other one is that we have started to use a lot of tools for management. One of them obviously is source control. The other one is, I'm writing this C parser because I decided I needed it and wanted it.

"So people it actually seems to be biggest problem..."

Complete Story

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