"Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests"
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Linux’s early rough edges weren’t a bug so much as a worldview. Torvalds is bluntly admitting that the original gravitational pull of open-source development wasn’t “user friendliness” or market adoption; it was scratch-your-own-itch engineering. That matters because it punctures the tidy myth that community-built software is automatically designed for everyone. It’s designed for the people who show up, and in the beginning that meant technically fluent contributors optimizing for what they personally needed: obscure hardware support, clever kernel improvements, elegant tools. Ease of installation is the kind of unglamorous work that rarely earns status in hacker culture, so it lagged.
The phrase “before the commercial ventures” does a lot of quiet work. It frames capitalism not as a corrupting force but as an incentive system that reallocates attention toward the boring, essential parts: installers, documentation, packaging, predictable release cycles, support contracts. In other words, commerce doesn’t replace the community; it professionalizes the interface between the community and the rest of the world.
There’s also a gentle self-critique in “motivated mainly by their own interests.” Torvalds isn’t scolding; he’s normalizing. He’s signaling that idealism alone doesn’t ship a smooth product, and that scaling an ecosystem requires aligning motivations. The context is the 1990s-to-2000s maturation of Linux: the rise of distributions, enterprise backers, and the pragmatic realization that adoption depends less on philosophical purity than on making it easy for non-experts to say yes.
The phrase “before the commercial ventures” does a lot of quiet work. It frames capitalism not as a corrupting force but as an incentive system that reallocates attention toward the boring, essential parts: installers, documentation, packaging, predictable release cycles, support contracts. In other words, commerce doesn’t replace the community; it professionalizes the interface between the community and the rest of the world.
There’s also a gentle self-critique in “motivated mainly by their own interests.” Torvalds isn’t scolding; he’s normalizing. He’s signaling that idealism alone doesn’t ship a smooth product, and that scaling an ecosystem requires aligning motivations. The context is the 1990s-to-2000s maturation of Linux: the rise of distributions, enterprise backers, and the pragmatic realization that adoption depends less on philosophical purity than on making it easy for non-experts to say yes.
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| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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