Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

There is a quiet provocation in Torvalds calling Linux a "product" and himself a "manager". It pushes against the romantic origin story of open source as pure gift economy: no bosses, no suits, just code and ideals. Torvalds frames the real differentiator as governance. The subtext is blunt: technical brilliance doesn not scale without someone willing to curate, arbitrate, and say no. That is less heroic than inventing a kernel, but often more consequential.

The phrasing "I like to think" signals a self-aware, slightly defensive humility. Torvalds knows "good manager" is a loaded label in developer culture, where management can read as parasitism. He reframes it as service: the unglamorous work of triage, release discipline, and maintaining a coherent direction in a project that could easily fragment into incompatible forks. In Linux's history, that role has been unusually centralized. The benevolent dictator model (with all its virtues and hazards) kept Linux legible to contributors and reliable for institutions that bet real money on it.

Calling management "instrumental" also hints at a broader cultural argument: open source wins not only through openness, but through structure. Linux became infrastructure because it behaved like infrastructure, with gatekeeping, standards, and accountability. Torvalds is staking a claim that meritocracy isn not an automatic property of the crowd; it is a crafted outcome, enforced through process and personality.