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Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto (u.today)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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  • Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
  • Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
  • Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
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[–] 62 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I disagree. Git is great but we'd have done fine with Subversion or whatever. Could you imagine the whole internet running on Windows Server though? The thought alone makes my skin crawl.

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  • [+] -13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You probably need to learn a bit more about VCS fundamentals if you think Subversion would've been fine.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm old enough to remember the SVN days (he'll, even the CVS and....dare I say it.... source safe days).

    Git is fantastic. It's pretty universally uses because it's the best dvcs out there and it's free. It wipes the pants with the likes of mercurial.

    In certain industries (such as gaming) there's still a strong hold by perforce but we can ignore that as it's proprietary and a bit specialised.

    Anyway, as great as git is for making things easier and cleaner when dealing with distributed development, it by no means makes something impossible "possible" - it just makes it a hell of a lot easier.

    The Linux kernel on the other hand enabled a lot of impossible things. Remember back in the day there wasn't anything free and open source in the operating system world, it was all proprietary and licensed. If you wanted to create your own operating system, you basically had no option but to spend a fortune either writing your own kernel or licensing someone else's (and the licensing part means you cannot distribute it for free).

    The fact that the FSF has always wanted to write their own OS and never been able to achieve it without the Linux Kernel, in spite of them essentially writing "everything else" that makes up an operating system, shows just how nontrivial this is.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Do you think the existence of the Linux kernel might've had an effect on how Hurd was prioritized? Also, FreeBSD wasn't too far behind, chronologically.

    I'm not saying Linux is unimportant (or even less important), but I think some folks here are pretty clueless about the significance of widespread DVCS adoption.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Pijul and similar patch-based systems are a lot better. They match my understanding of independent changes combining. git does the stupidest thing and just compares states - which means it has less information to automatically merge correctly

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, I don't know what you mean, so possibly? I just briefly used SVN in a small team for about half a year and would never claim to be an expert. It's alive and kicking though, so regardless what you say I don't believe it's a complete clusterfuck and a world without git would be doomed.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Torvalds didn't create git because he was passionate about version control systems, he created it because the existing solutions were not adequate.

    Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that facilitated a fundamental shift in how people collaborate on software projects in general. So, comparing it to SVN and downplaying the significance of Git suggests you've kind of missed the point.

    Edit: with you on the other thing though - fuck Windows.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Geese, then take whatever else if working in a remote location without upstream access is important to you (note that I originally wrote "Subversion or whatever"). It's just version control, not rocket science.

    I'm a git devotee myself, love it despite its growing redundancies. But I am able to imagine a world without it and don't tremble in fear. That's all I said here.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    You're thinking in terms of a single dev using revision control, but the person you responded to was referring to the higher level aspects of software development that git facilitates. In other words, you've completely missed the point.

    As for the Linux kernel, if it hadn't come along, we'd likely be living in FreeBSD-dominated world. Or, perhaps Hurd would've received more attention.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    lol. I'm old enough to have worked with SVN (and many others) as part of my day job, and I promise you that 99% of git users use literally the same exact workflow as they did/would have under any other VCS. Git's fine, but it's neither revolutionary nor important from a user's perspective.

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