"People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born"
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The origin myth of great software is usually told as a lone genius story; Torvalds shrugs and points to something messier and more human: people craving a room to be in. The line is deceptively plain, but it smuggles in a worldview that’s shaped the modern Internet: creation as a side effect of community, not just ambition. “Enjoy the interaction” is doing a lot of work here. It frames programming less as abstract problem-solving and more as social life - banter, status, shared rituals, the small dopamine hits of being seen by peers who actually get it.
Then there’s “belonging,” a word that quietly reclassifies open-source culture as identity formation. You don’t just contribute patches; you join a tribe with its own norms, jokes, feuds, and gatekeeping. “A group that does something interesting” is a minimalist definition of a scene. It avoids utopian claims about democratizing technology and instead leans into a simpler truth: people will do unpaid, difficult labor if it comes with meaning, recognition, and the sense that they’re inside the conversation rather than watching it.
The context matters: Torvalds helped midwife Linux in the early 1990s, when the Internet’s rough-and-ready forums made collaboration feel like a frontier. His intent reads as both explanation and recruitment pitch. Build the hangout, and the project will follow. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to corporate, top-down product thinking: you can’t manufacture belonging, but you can design conditions where it becomes productive.
Then there’s “belonging,” a word that quietly reclassifies open-source culture as identity formation. You don’t just contribute patches; you join a tribe with its own norms, jokes, feuds, and gatekeeping. “A group that does something interesting” is a minimalist definition of a scene. It avoids utopian claims about democratizing technology and instead leans into a simpler truth: people will do unpaid, difficult labor if it comes with meaning, recognition, and the sense that they’re inside the conversation rather than watching it.
The context matters: Torvalds helped midwife Linux in the early 1990s, when the Internet’s rough-and-ready forums made collaboration feel like a frontier. His intent reads as both explanation and recruitment pitch. Build the hangout, and the project will follow. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to corporate, top-down product thinking: you can’t manufacture belonging, but you can design conditions where it becomes productive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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