No he didn’t. He built a proof of concept demo in 7 days then handed it off to other maintainers to code for real. I’m not sure why this myth keeps getting repeated. Linus himself clarifies this in every interview about git.
His main contributions were his ideas.
1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.
2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.
Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!
Those were not his ideas. Before Git, the Linux kernel team was using BitKeeper for DVCS (and other DVCS implementations like Perforce existed as well). Git was created as a BitKeeper replacement after a fight erupted between Andrew Tridgell (who was accused of trying to reverse engineer BitKeeper in violation of its license) and Larry McVoy (the author of BitKeeper).
I agree and that’s the point I was trying to make.
Linus’s contribution is a great one. He learned from prior tools and contributions, made a lot of smart technical decisions, got stuff moving with a prototype, then displayed good technical leadership by handing it off to a dedicated development team.
That’s such a good lesson for all of us devs.
So why the urge to lie and pretend he coded it in a week with no help? I know you’re not saying this, but this is the common myth.
He did what needed to be done. Linux similarly has thousands of contributors and Linus's personal "code contribution" is almost negligible these days. But code doesn't matter. Literally anyone can generate thousands of lines of code that will flip bits all day long. What matters is some combination of the following: a vision, respect from peers earned with technical brilliance, audaciousness, tenacity, energy, dedication etc. This is what makes Linus special. Not his ability to bash on a keyboard all day long.
The parent comments are arguing that 17million for git 2.0 is insane because Linux wrote the original in a week.
Except that’s not true. He sketched out a proof of concept in a week. Then handed it off to a team of maintainers who worked on it for the next two decades.
It’s also not pedantic because Linus himself makes this distinction. He doesn’t say he coded Git and specifically corrects people in interviews when they this.
Apart from your last paragraph which is a little contentious, I agree with what you say.
I dont understand why people here require that every tech ceo to be some professional programmer or engineer. I don't think you _need_ to be that deep in it as the CEO. There are plenty of leaders at OpenAI that already fit the bill.
Sam is good at getting funding, seeing the bigger picture, and rallying towards a cause. That is the job of a CEO. It doesn't matter (imo) that he doesn't know how many parameters the next release will have. All that matters is he knows the impact of the new release and knows who to defer to for actual technical decisions.
Inauthentic activity benefits from privacy though. Inauthentic activity is a primary use case of ChatGPT, which is way more successful than anything you've ever made. Do you think kids using ChatGPT to cheat on homework would care if their chats were "private" but educators could check if submitted essays matched generated content? Uh, yes. So privacy isn't as simple of an idea as you think it is, and is certainly extremely valuable.
It's a telling that you picked an example where one user could access another user's private info in an unauthorized way. No famous app does that.
When I say privacy, I mean supporting the company promises a stronger privacy mechanism e.g. run locally, e2e encryption where the company itself cannot access your private info. This is the case for Session.
It turns out most users are okay with you promising not to use/access their private info for other means. That's already sufficient. Then, other factors e.g. usefulness are more important.
"When I say privacy, I mean everything that makes me right, and everything that makes you wrong."
"No no, that's not what I mean. I mean, privacy is this only, specifically this set of technologies applied to this very specific set of products, and nothing else. Whatever definition will allow me to make this conversation as uninteresting as possible."
Look, I guess my point is, privacy is complicated. In my example, I suppose OpenAI could authorize access to something. They already do, for training. Right? And in some sense, something valuable leaks from one users' data to another. It is still privacy when access to your data is limited in some important way from other people, even when you (or a lot of people, or other people) could benefit from such access. The biggest apps in the world have very, very complicated privacy stories.
It is certainly extremely valuable as an ideological construct, i.e. a fake notion to mislead people into self-defeating behaviors.
"Why not use $COP_APP?" "It's not private" "Well it's by a private company, it's not run by the government or anything - what the fuck are you talking about, corporal?"
Enterprise contracts almost always include a platform fee on top of per-seat costs (67% of contracts), plus professional services that add 12–18% of first-year revenue.
So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.
> So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.
I'll add the nuance that those might be big companies with slack capacity, or at least firms that already are at a point in their effort/performance curve where marginal effort injections in their core business are not worthy enough (a point that, without being big companies, would be actually weird). Even with AI and as processes become more efficient effort is at premium, and depending on your firm situation an man-hour used in your business might be a better use of effort and time that using it on non-core services.
Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other companies will be creating the specific, managed solution.
I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.
The moat is the whole package working together, not any single piece. That's what I've been finding building this (atmita.com). Cloud-native from scratch (not based on OpenClaw), so there's zero setup. It can hit any API directly, falls back to 1000+ managed integrations, and uses a browser when nothing else works. Memory is dynamic and adapts to whatever the task needs, and no user has complained about it breaking.
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