 Let me welcome Weenus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and get welcome, welcome, welcome. Have a seat. Welcome old timer. Well, I mean, this day has started off well. First, you said that we have an insane speaker lineup, and I was like, who is he thinking about? Oh yeah, you know who I was thinking about. And now I'm yesterday's next. Well, you know what's old is new again. And, you know, we won't talk about it. I know you and I are very, very, as you know, very close in age. But I want to start by, you know, you've been doing this for what, 26 years now? 26 years. We're releasing the Linux kernel every three months or so now out of your house in Portland. Yes. And, you know, let me just, Time Magazine called you the 17th most important person of the century. I'm working on that. There you go. Businessweek described you as the Henry Ford of the Information Age. You're in the Internet Hall of Fame. You won the Millennium Technology Prize, which is essentially the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. Have you ever thought about the fact that even though you're maybe yesterday's news, you're an important person in the world? I don't really, because to be honest, well, I do and I don't. So the part that I really am happy about is the fact that I know I do something meaningful. And I think everybody wants to do that, right? Everybody wants to feel like what they do matters. You don't want to just have a job. You want to do something that has an impact, right? Regardless of what you're into, whether you're into technology or anything else. And that's part of what really makes me happy to still do not quite the same thing, but still work on the same project 26 years later is that I feel like it's meaningful. At the same time, I literally work from my home office in my bathrobe. I mean, it is not a glamorous life. I've long since gotten over the fact that, okay, the UPS guy comes and brings me a package from Amazon at 3 p.m. and I'm still in my bathrobe. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just saying, I don't believe that. I thought we had a shower before noon policy at the Linux Foundation. That's why I don't go to the office anymore. Well, you wrote an entire book on this concept of having impact but then working for fun, right? You said over and over again that's the reason you got into Linux. That's why you continue to work on Linux. But you heard Christine saying, we need to pay developers. I agree with her to get them in. 90% or more, I think, of the people who work on Linux are all professional developers. Full time on that. Does that make it less fun, more fun? Is this sort of professionalization of open source good, bad? What do you think of that? I don't know if anybody actually read the book. But the premise of the book was that you kind of move on to fun. That you have to start with the survival. And if you don't have survival, you're not going to care about having fun, right? That's kind of the basis. And you're moving on to the point where once you've guaranteed survival, once you've guaranteed that you have this social connection to the world around you, you want to get to the point where the most motivating thing in your life is fun. I mean, it's different fun for different people. For me, it's the fun of a technical challenge, right? That to me is fun. It's not fun for everybody. Hopefully it is fun for most people in this audience, right? And one of the things I'm a big believer on is in order to have fun, you really don't want to worry about the whole daily survival thing. And admittedly, that was easier, I think, in Finland where I grew up, where education is free. So me taking basically eight years to get a master's degree and doing Linux for fun on the side was a lot easier than it would be here in the US, right? But to get to your actual question, the whole fact that you are employable in technology today is what allows you to then do fun projects because you know you can find a job which is not necessarily true in many other areas. And that allows you to do experimentation and work on projects that you might not otherwise be free to work on. And I think it's very important to have companies involved in open source. And it's actually one of the things I've been happiest about in the whole Linux community was how to some degree Linux came out of the free software movement and there was a lot of anti-commercial, and there still to some degree is, people who kind of do it because they hate companies. And I always felt that, no, that's not how you're supposed to work. I think you're supposed to do it because you enjoy your work, but you should not hate those companies that can actually help make your project better, can bring you all those users because users to any project are what really matter. Admittedly you can get users otherwise too. But at the end of the day, a lot of the people you want to reach need to have support, need to have all those nice finishing touches, the Q&A, the documentation, the things that a lot of technical people, certainly me, may not be that interested in. So I think we've succeeded in the kernel community in particular very well with this realization that it's not about the small guy against the companies. It really is about collaboration, and it's collaboration whether you're a small individual contributor or whether you're a company or whether you're a university or anything in between. Yeah, I mean it creates this positive feedback loop, right? You have to acknowledge both. I think the interesting thing is the combination of the intrinsic motivation, I think Harvard, Karim Lakhani at Harvard did a great study on this where peer review, the mastering of your craft, the joy of solving big technical problems combined by the ability for companies to, to your point, allow people to survive by paying them, creates this massive feedback loop that Linux certainly benefits from. I want to say on that point, so I often describe myself as the janitor of, I want you to judge me, right? That's how I describe you too. I shower before noon, okay? But, you know, one of our jobs is to be the supporting cast to help open up markets, you know, the auto sector, we talked about this last night at dinner. You know, today we're seeing Linux and production vehicles, we took seven years to work with automotive OEMs, they're tier one suppliers, they're then subsequent downstream suppliers to teach them how to participate in open source, to understand the licensing regimes, to allow their employees to jump in and participate. My question to you is, you know, we're doing all that stuff in the background. How does it impact, have you seen an impact? Is this, you know, really hitting the kernel community? Do you see better participation, better support for different hardware architectures? So one of the things I notice is we're having a lot easier time working with people who work at companies that are not necessarily part of the community. It used to be a huge problem with a lot of tech companies where we had educated technical people who really wanted to collaborate with us, but their companies would not allow them to work on open source projects. And when they did allow them, it was all quite often, not always, but most of the time it was do not use the company email address. Because companies used to not, they were worried about their employees being associated with a project that was not their project. And I think, it's not just Linux Foundation, but this whole, the last couple of decades, teaching companies that you can actually be participating in the process and teaching legal people inside companies who are basically taught from high school that their job is to cover the company's ass. Teaching those legal people that it's actually okay to have developers be involved in the process and actually put the company name there so that outside developers see that, hey, that company is actually doing something good, is a good thing. I think that's been one of the things that have changed. Let's say I do want to, I mean my reaction when you said it took us seven years to work with these auto manufacturers, that's actually a very common thing I've seen all over. Is that people think that Linux development is fast. And I mean we saw the numbers. Linux development at some level is very fast, but at the same time I notice it's over and over again that we take forever to do one particular thing, can take years and years of effort and a lot of people come into the project and they think, hey, they've heard all the hell, it happens yesterday. And I want to point out there's a lot of things on the technical side too where it took us seven years to get things working. So quite often you only see the end result when it's done and then it looks like, oh wow, yesterday it didn't work, now it works, these guys are good. But that kind of ignores the seven years before that it took to get something to that point where it's being used. Yeah. Let's talk about security a little bit. I talked about this Equifax hack and how it was a CVE in struts, but it's not the only one. We saw Heartbleed. We've seen in projects out there these CVEs can cause real havoc. And in terms of you're aware of the core infrastructure initiative and the work we're doing there, what are your thoughts on how we can improve if open source is the wellspring from which downstream all these products and services and so forth are made and then the salmon swim back upstream to re-deposit code. I'm losing the metaphor here, but you know what I'm talking about? How do we improve that wellspring from a security perspective? What are your thoughts? I'm one of those people who will tell everybody that the concept of absolute security does not exist. And even if we do a perfect job, which we try, but let's be honest, we'll always have bugs where we overlook some detail and a smart person comes in and say, hey, that's a bug that I can actually take advantage of. Even if we were to do a perfect job, there are all these projects that use the kernel and then even if they do a perfect job, somebody will deploy the end result wrongly and it's not secured despite all the work we did. So there is no such thing as perfect security or absolute security, but at the same time, I think people have gone so aware of the issue and most of the projects I'm aware of do... I'll talk about the kernel because that's what I obviously care about the most. We not only have all the infrastructure in place to do various checking, both statically and at runtime, but what I'm happiest about is I see all these tools to fuss inputs. It turns out random attacks is very powerful for finding various bugs and some of those bugs are security. When you have that infrastructure and I'm seeing a lot of projects use that infrastructure, it's getting to the point where you may not reach absolute security, but people who deploy the default models today are so much better off and they have so many layers of security that we're making obvious improvements and will we ever get to a perfect world? No. But I'm not actually worried. As a technical person, I'm always very impressed by some of the people who are attacking our code and sometimes I get the feeling that these smart people are doing really bad things, but I wish they were on our side because they are so smart and they could help us and that's where I actually want us to go, where we try to get as many of those smart people before they turn to the dark side and improve security that way by having a culture and having a lot of developers who care about security and encouraging the people who are interested in security to come to us instead of attacking us. In other words, get the POD1 learners early so that before they turn to the dark side... This is getting to be a bit too LA. The Linux Foundation is actually in the Lucas building, so we love Star Wars metaphors. Speaking of young people, one of the things that comes up all the time is how do we get the next generation of developers, I mean you heard Christine as well, into projects and I do see young developers in a lot of projects. Node.js is a great example, but the kernel, excuse a little bit older with all due respect, what's your perception in terms of how young people are coming in to the kernel? I actually think we're very good at that. We see a lot of the top level developers have been around for a long time and that does mean we're getting older, we're getting fatter, but we have a ton of new people. The kernel is kind of still an odd... Let me start over. In order to get into the kernel, you have to be interested in the kind of low level coding that a lot of people just aren't interested in. I don't think the kernel will ever be something that you would want to teach in a high school class just because it is still esoteric enough, device drivers actually knowing how a CPU works. It's fairly esoteric and you need a special kind of dedication to really even bother to care. At the same time, because it's so esoteric, the number of people who care may be a small percentage, but thanks to the internet we can capture that. Because being open source means that people can play with Linux in the way they can't play with proprietary projects, we get I think a large percentage of the people who are interested in these kinds of low level problems. We have thousands of people, I mean new people, every single release. A lot of people will only do something small and maybe they notice that it was a bit too involved or maybe they only had one small thing they needed to fix. From a health perspective, the kernel has more developers than just about any other open source project out there. So I'm not worried about that. I've seen other projects that flounder to get new people and flounder to get the kind of mind share that people are aware of them to come into it, and the kernel is not in that situation. Certainly we need to help those ones if they're important to society. Speaking of young folks getting involved in Linux, I want to kind of close here by talking about a letter we received back in 2014. So a few years ago, almost four years ago now, from a sixth grader in Pennsylvania, Zachary Dupont. I don't know if you remember this. So as part of a class project, his class was asked to write a letter to their hero. And if you'll humor me, I would love to roll a quick video here showing Zach back in 2014. We had a family PC since about 2010. And in 2012, I heard of Linux, and I started experimenting with it a lot. I think my first distro was a Boon 2 12.04 that I tried out in VirtualBox. I don't know too much programming. I don't even know much programming, but I would still love to learn programming and even get a job. Maybe someday I could probably become a sysadmin in Linux. I could help people use Linux. It was a school project. Of course, I decided to send a letter to Linus Torvalds. He was my hero, and I was actually doubting I would actually be able to find out who I could send it to. Then I remembered how much I loved Linux and how much I wanted to meet Linus Torvalds. So I decided to send him a letter. All my other friends sent letters to more Hollywood or internet celebrities. But I doubt they actually got flown to a good place like this to meet them. Meeting Linus Torvalds was a great experience. Once the whole panel thing was done, he went out of the stage and went to my row. We shook hands and he signed my Linux Bible. He gave me a copy of his Just for Fun book with a signature, of course. I loved meeting Linus Torvalds. It was a great experience overall. I got to have so much goodies or swag. It made me think of all these things like my future is going to be great. And you know, I loved it. What a great story. So we just so happened to have Zach here with us today. We thought we'd revisit him a few years later. Zach, come on up on stage. Come on over, have a seat. Alright, where should I sit? Good to see you again. It's great to see you guys. It's also great to see you, Linus. Have a seat. Now, as you guys have probably noticed, my voice has definitely gotten lower. Since I was 12. But I'm really excited to be here. It's been such a great opportunity. And I've always wanted to see the West Coast, especially Los Angeles, the city of angels. I think that's what it was. That's right. That's right. So you are a high school sophomore this year. Yes, I am a high school sophomore. And you were accepted early into the computer networking and digital forensics program at the Delaware County Technical School. I've been doing some research on you. We've been monitoring you. Tell us how you decided to apply for that program. Well, I think what really motivated me to apply for that program is, I think one of my teachers gave me a little booklet. And so this booklet had a bunch of classes for that technical school. And one of them popped up. There was another one that was like Apple systems and design. But that was more for like artistry. Creating flash animations and stuff like that. There was one that really stood out to me though. And that one was the computer networking and digital forensics. And really, and I've been in that class for quite a few days now. It's really good because you get to work hands on with computer hardware and software. And there's basically so much stuff to work with. And so far, I think it's one of the best classes I've ever taken. And I think it really makes high school a lot more fun. You know, a lot more than just your history and your math and your English. You know, it's definitely been such an enhancing experience in my education. And you had an internship with SAP this summer. And I want to ask you two questions. One, what advice do you have to lean its tour balls? What advice? Well... And the two, what do you want to do when you graduate? Let's start with number one. Any advice for lean its tour balls? Well, I'd say you've lean its tour balls have built quite a platform over these past 20 years. And I think in the 2010s, the popularity of Linux and open source is skyrocketing. And it skyrockets faster and faster each year. So no matter how popular it gets, just embrace it. Because the future is going to be centered a lot around technology. Just like back in whenever they first made the TV and the radio, that people just started getting obsessed with watching and listening to broadcasts. And I think this is sort of a new wave, except it's going to be even bigger. Because technology doesn't just impact entertainment. It impacts pretty much everything in our daily lives. And I just think that it's so amazing to be a part of this revolution. We are happy to have you. What do you want to do when you graduate? Have you given any thought to that? Well, I've given a lot of thought to that actually. And I want to make sure I go to a good, great college. And in that video from a few years ago, I said I wanted to be sort of a sysadmin or maybe even program. And I'm still kind of sticking to the sysadmin, wanting to be a sysadmin. And basically because I mean, I think I do pretty good as a developer given the proper education. But I mean, programming's nice. I actually do play around a lot in HTML despite the fact that I use WordPress on my website. But the fact is that sysadmin, you really get to work hands-on with technology in a business. And I don't know if it's going to be a large or small business in the future. But despite that, technology is really my passion. And a sysadmin job would really give me such a, it would give me a great platform to work my magic, you know? Any advice for him? You got any? Go back and forth. I'm really happy that people want to be sysadmins because they make my life so much easier. I agree. Exactly. It's my thought exactly. All right. Well, Zach, I want to thank you so much for coming down here. You are an honored member of our community. Linus, thanks for coming up. Everyone give these two a round of applause. Thank you. And you know, it really is important to empower this next generation. For those of you who don't know this, we have free childcare at all of our events. Bring your kids. Many of you have met my daughter many, many times. We also, this Sunday, let's show a photo. We had coding workshops. We had over 40 kids get together and learn how to code. And you know, this is your event. This is your community. Get involved. You can come. You can meet these kids. You can meet folks like Zach. You can share your knowledge. You're some of the best developers in the world. Let's start teaching this next generation. So thanks to both of you. Thank you.