"What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out"
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Torvalds is doing something characteristically pragmatic here: praising the thing open-source culture loves to hate. In the Linux mythos, commercialism is the corrupting force, the suit-and-tie invasion of a volunteer utopia. His sentence flips that piety on its head. Not because he suddenly trusts corporations to be benevolent, but because he cares about outcomes, not purity tests.
The intent is blunt: the real obstacle to mass adoption was never the kernel. It was everything that wraps around it: installation, dependencies, packaging, updates, the mundane plumbing that turns a powerful system into something a normal person can live with. Volunteer projects often overproduce brilliance and underproduce finish. Commercial incentives, Torvalds argues, reward the unglamorous work. Someone has to lose money when a user can’t install a Wi-Fi driver; “packaging issues” are where ideology meets customer support.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to a certain kind of Linux romantic: the belief that technical excellence automatically becomes usability. It doesn’t. Ease-of-use is not a natural byproduct; it’s a product decision, sustained by resources, deadlines, and accountability. “Good distribution” is also a strategic dodge: it credits the ecosystem (distros, maintainers, vendors) rather than pretending Linux is a single monolith that Torvalds authors alone.
Context matters: Linux’s rise wasn’t just hacker culture winning; it was a truce between hobbyist freedom and enterprise demands. Torvalds is naming the deal that made Linux big: commerce didn’t invent the code, but it professionalized the experience.
The intent is blunt: the real obstacle to mass adoption was never the kernel. It was everything that wraps around it: installation, dependencies, packaging, updates, the mundane plumbing that turns a powerful system into something a normal person can live with. Volunteer projects often overproduce brilliance and underproduce finish. Commercial incentives, Torvalds argues, reward the unglamorous work. Someone has to lose money when a user can’t install a Wi-Fi driver; “packaging issues” are where ideology meets customer support.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to a certain kind of Linux romantic: the belief that technical excellence automatically becomes usability. It doesn’t. Ease-of-use is not a natural byproduct; it’s a product decision, sustained by resources, deadlines, and accountability. “Good distribution” is also a strategic dodge: it credits the ecosystem (distros, maintainers, vendors) rather than pretending Linux is a single monolith that Torvalds authors alone.
Context matters: Linux’s rise wasn’t just hacker culture winning; it was a truce between hobbyist freedom and enterprise demands. Torvalds is naming the deal that made Linux big: commerce didn’t invent the code, but it professionalized the experience.
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| Topic | Technology |
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