Linus Torvalds didn’t create Linux
I got into the following debate on Hacker News over one of my recent posts.
lutusp: ” … He is one of the key people who drove Facebook’s growth from 30 million users in 2005 to 550 million users in 2011 (the year he left).” He was present, but how can anyone meaningfully claim that he “drove” or was in any way responsible for the increase in users? Facebook now has over a billion users, half of whom signed up since this person left Facebook. I mention this only because too many claims like this are made based on zero evidence of a cause-effect relationship.
armansu: It’s a team effort, no doubt. But how do they introduce Linus Torvalds [1], Kevin Systrom or David H. Hansson? ‘The man who created Linux’, ‘the creator of Instagram’, DHH introduces himself as ‘the creator of Ruby on Rails’. Obviously, singlehandedly they haven’t created what we understand by those products, they started them and were principal forces, but haven’t CREATED them. This simplification (the proxy of the reality) is the accepted norm in respectful introductions. My statement about Chamath was merely that.
lutusp: ”This simplification (the proxy of the reality) is the accepted norm in respectful introductions”. Yes, true enough. It shows the limited role played by science and scientific thinking in everyday life. Of a group of 256 people tossing fair coins, one of them has a better than 50% probability of throwing eight heads in a row, in eight throws. Does that mean he’s a genius, deserving a special introduction at public meetings?
armansu: Don’t you think the world’s best distance runners from Kenya and Ethiopia do deserve a special intro at public meetings? Aren’t genetic endowments and natural advantages an equivalent of ‘throwing eight heads in a row’:link?
What are your thoughts on this old as the world question of leadership and credit? Do most leaders you see, in fact, take the blame and give the credit? Which individuals come to mind as the examples of this?
Notes
[1] Linus contributed to the kernel which is about 10% of the operating system’s codebase with the rest being made up of file systems, utilities, etc.
