Lex Fridman on the genius of Linus Torvalds | Lex Fridman Podcast

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:02]One of the legends of the community is of course Linus Torvalds who uh created Linux and is a long-time maintainer of the Linux kernel.

[00:00:13]As legend goes, he can be pretty harsh on this meritocratic process of reviewing the code and saying it's not good enough. Can you Can you just speak to to the legend of Linus Torvalds?

[00:00:23]>> Linus is one of a kind, right? And and I would even go and say that what he did you don't get is more interesting that what he did on the Linux kernel.

[00:00:34]He's very [snorts] harsh, but what people don't see is usually when he's harsh to it's people who are maintainer of part of the kernel, right? So they know him, right? So he's not very harsh like that to everyone. The thing is what he created in his room is basically powering every server online, right?

[00:00:52]Even at Microsoft cloud called Azure.

[00:00:55]I'm quite sure 70-80% of the servers are running Linux. All your Android phones are running Linux. What he did um with the power of a of a good source, sure, is amazing. Um and yes, the quality of the Linux kernel is very high and yes, it's difficult, but we cannot compromise on that. We cannot compromise on quality because in the end and you have to understand that is the core community of VLC is five people.

[00:01:25]The core community of FFmpeg is 10 to 15.

[00:01:29]And we are the ones who are going to maintain your code, right? Because 1,000 contributors in the timeline and just 10 staying it's 1% chance that someone comes and stays. 1%. So you will have change of job, change of wife, you have children, you have accident in life, you're going to change jobs, whatever. You're not going to come back.

[00:01:50]It's most likely. So we are the one going to maintain your code. It needs to be maintainable. It needs to be excellent.

[00:01:59]And yes, sometimes that means that you need to rework your work because it was good, but it's not excellent. And we need excellence because we have very few to maintain something that is critical for the whole. But we should also mention that there is some some spiciness, some harshness to the language that's sometimes used when you're uh keeping this high bar of excellence.

[00:02:20]Uh is there something to say to that?

[00:02:21]>> It It's true, right? Um It's also the fact that for example, what we're doing is low level, it's extremely technical.

[00:02:27]Uh you get into this community, the tone gets um very like a type of It's a subculture, right? So people who arrive from the external um basically not known to the subculture. Most of those people around FFmpeg and VLC, we do VideoLAN Dev Days, VDD, uh every every year.

[00:02:46]They're so fun in real life and they love it, but it's true that you're online and sometimes like the the tone you don't realize how it is. Uh but that's okay. It's a culture. I mean, you get this in the gaming culture, there's pretty harsh and tense the way people communicate and it's everyone understands that the way you show love and respect just looks different in different communities. Sometimes people It It depends. If it's a book club, usually people are going to be much sweeter. If it's a open source >> [laughter] >> project that's very high stakes and used by millions of people. But it's very not often insults that you see for example in the gaming, right? And so Linus' tone is a bit unusual even for the open source community. It's more like It's more harsh on the result saying, "No, this is not good. This is crap." Those type of things that you will see. Try not to make it about the person, make it about the code. Yeah. It's very very matter-of-fact. And I think you've got to look at it in terms of you know, the famous FFmpeg is developed almost entirely by volunteers and that's true. And you've got to imagine someone's done a hard day's work at their day job, they come home, you know, terseness might be a thing, you know, and and that's not something to take personally.

[00:03:56]You're tired, you're busy, but you still care about this open source stuff.

[00:04:00]And you may not be able to explain and and handhold someone on every subtle detail.