Interview: with Linus Torvalds

Interview: with Linus Torvalds

Article from Issue 131/2011

In June of this year, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman sat down with Linus Torvalds in front of a live audience at LinuxCon Japan to look at the first 20 years of Linux, the state of the kernel, and the future of Linux.

Greg Kroah-Hartman: You announced that the version number is going to change. You said 3.0.

Linus Torvalds: It’s not out yet, but I did the RC just before I left for this trip. If everything goes well – and it looks fine so far – in about seven or eight weeks, we’ll have the final 3.0 release just in time for the year’s festivities. I’m actually really happy about the whole thing. I’m finally getting rid of 2.6!

I don’t know how many of you know this, but with our old versioning, I added a third number – we’re up to 39 right now – and then to make things even more interesting, Greg does something like 2.6.39.1 to number the stable releases. It just gets really messy. Then all the distributions have their own build version, so when you actually run Linux, you will run something like 2.6.39.7-13 [audience laughs]. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and it’s been kind of meaningless.

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