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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-04-15
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XTHdcmjenI
thank you so many of you may not recognize this person on the screen he lives here in Portland Oregon he was named the seventeenth most influential person of the century time magazine this is leans toward vaults you've never heard of him probably heard of the software he created we missed Torvalds created Lennox the world's most cesspool software it runs everything I'm a kid it's in your
fault it's in a car senior television it runs your bank it runs most of the global economy it runs air traffic control systems nuclear submarines it runs most of the internet you use Windex every single day multiple times a day you don't even so if you're in the tech industry you for sure have heard the leanest horrible and almost none of you have ever heard I
mean this Torvalds boss now I know what you're thinking wow this guy is the boss of one of the seventeenth most influential guy the sake theory wrote the world's most prolific software what else who else works for this guy person who created the internet so first of all no Al Gore does not work for me but let me show you a couple of others who do
you especially about girl there that's my daughter for a half year old daughter need and funny is Nisha actually shares a lot in common cleanest warbles no it's true it's true first of all they're both adorable circuit they're both geniuses and finally neither of them listen to anything that I say in other words I'm nobody's gloss unfortunately leanest or both doesn't really need a boss great
mascot this penguin analytics really has done very successfully spike me and let me show you a few numbers give you an idea of what this looks like one point three million one point three million smartphones running lyrics are activated every single day seven hundred thousand televisions are sold every single day running Lennox ninety two percent of the world's high performance computing system that predicts climate change
forecast the weather run the sermon supercollider are all running Lennox eighty five percent of the world's global equity trading platforms run Windex the New York Stock Exchange the Tokyo stock exchange the London Stock Exchange most of our economy runs on clinics thousand trillion dollars is the amount of transactions that happen on just one clinic system the Chicago mercantile it runs Google Facebook Amazon most of the
internet it is by far the world's most widely deployed software so how does lead us do it and why should you care for that matter well he does it collaborative fleet by working thousands developers all across the world different countries forming a grand act of creation and I'm just a bit player in this grand play that's been unfolding over the last twenty years but as a
witness to all of this technically as lean as his boss I've learned some lessons that I'd like to share with you today so that you might become better collaborators so that you might achieve same access someone like meanness in like some of these lessons may surprise you the first lesson I learned don't dream date don't dream day this is it email from Lina's Torvalds twenty years
ago announcing the creation of clinics I'm not doing anything big just something for fun and what's interesting here whether it was intentional or not Venus was paraphrasing the poet Robert Frost who said don't aim for success if that's what you want do what you love and believe it it will follow and I think it's appropriate that we this was paraphrasing the poem because what's happening behind
thousands of computer screens all over the world the renaissance the Michelangelo's Vinci's and the Rafael's of their day creating great poetry doing it because they love it we just felt so strongly about this that he wrote an entire book on it any name that title that just for fun because when you're doing this kind of grand creation and collaboration when you're doing it because you love
it and you believe in it create great things and let me tell you there is a difference between a house painter and da Vinci and the grand code poets who are writing this crew lead believe in what they're doing it it is making a huge difference throughout the world and because they believe in it so much they don't care about lesson to which is give it
all away give it away you see when it is open source anybody can take it and use it clearly for free you don't have to ask permission can just take when X. rabbit build anything you want in fact the only thing you have to do if you make changes to win X. and improve it yet to share those changes with everybody gets and when I tell
people this they think you guys are idiots you should've seen the crestfallen look on my wife's face on our first date when I told her I worked at a nonprofit nobody can make any money you know giving things away right well that's not true and I'm going to prove it to you what if I showed you three companies one in based entirely on free and open
source off one based partially on free and open source software and one that's completely based on close software they don't give anything away they sell it what do you think the results from those companies with well here's what it would look like this is a chart showing red hat IBM and Microsoft's results for the last five years and at the top red hat a software company
that gives away free software that this is their entire company on free software self service and support has gone up almost two hundred percent the last five years IBM which all of you have heard of it might surprise you to know they sell billions of dollars of hardware selling on which contain almost entirely free software and Microsoft at the bottom source close software that they create
by themselves sell for a price in the last half decade they have returned almost no shareholder value so when I tell people this this okay Jim that makes sense we get it but there's just one hole we can put into your argument right me to make sense in a red hat's doing well is a movement that we think is the but what about apple right you
think you all got Mira it's how many people here have an iPhone alright I want you to do something with me take it out going to the settings go into general about in legal notices right and you're gonna see something interesting in their inside of every I phone every iPad there is re see the good new public license from the free software foundation you will see
the names of prominent open source developers you'll see oodles and oodles of free software because apple knows something that many people don't but that I'm showing you today which is when you stand on the shoulders of giants when you use free software and take part in this grand collaboration you can innovate at ever higher levels and that's what apple so if anybody tells you you can't
make money by giving things away you tell them they are wrong and then tell move out my next lesson the best way to get something done it's not to have a plan don't have a plan the plan for Lennox is there is no plan right well what seems counter intuitive but you're you're not seeing the power of self forming when you collaborate you want people to
create things organically that's what happens within limits Gannett Klay communities come together to solve their problems that if we just for Mulder meor anybody had tried to plan out they would of never thought of that's why we Knicks runs on a small hand held phone and also powers the world's largest at the same time and what happens here isn't it incredible cross pollination of ideas where
a person trying to save on battery life in a phone by controlling the amount of power when excuse helps the guy running the world's biggest computer because the cost of the world's biggest computer the number one because it's not that the hardware it's not the software it's the power and cooling so by creating the sole forming communities they're exchanging these ideas incredibly adding all this incredible
value in producing at a pace that's unprecedented let me just show you how unprecedented that he sits ten thousand five hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred eighty two that's number of lines of code added to and track that from when X. every a million lines of code were added to the next the last Homer's epic believe it in thousand one war and peace about forty fifty thousand
every single hour of every single day seven changes happen it is unprecedented and his resulted in over ten billion dollars of value creation over the last the most successful collaborative development project in the history of four hundred seven companies thousands of individuals coming together in harmony speaking of harmony that leads me to the next lesson which is if your work enough fasten your work with that
many people across this many cultures think you'd have to be good at collaborating right and you think you have to be a pretty nice person to get along with all of these it's well you would be wrong you don't always have to be nice in fact whew score vaults sometimes it's not so nice did I mention he doesn't listen to anything I have to say but
what we this is doing here is he's engaging in a flame war flame wars are how coders often communicate the criticize each other they defend their ideas they ridicule code in this world code talks and be S. walks right and you think this would be a bad way to create software right yelling at each other all the time these guys are pretty neat what's interesting in
two thousand three university California Berkeley did a study about how ideas are created who how you can create the best idea they took a bunch of people only put him into groups one group was given traditional brainstorming instruct it's right no ideas about idea don't criticize all that how many fewer brainstorm another group was given the instructions debate rigorously defend your ideas and guess what bait
group didn't just do better if they crushed it they came up with an order of magnitude better idea so what does all of this mean how can you not dream big give it away not have a plan and be a jerk can anything be done collaboratively and maybe we use Torvalds can get away with that right but other people are catching on to this and this
is really the few collaboration and I'm going to show you that by asking you a quick question who do you think said the following statements code wins arguments the best idea and implementation should always win the hacker way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement in adoration hackers believe that something can always be better nothing it's like something we missed or both would say
right fact he said things like this over and over again over the last he didn't say it mark Zuckerberg said this and what's more important than the fact that mark Zuckerberg said it when he said it mark Zuckerberg said this case on the eve of Facebook's IPO sky was about to become a multi billionaire in on the eve of the most anticipated financial event of the
last decade intact he didn't talk about price earnings ratio or profitability instead he wrote a letter titled the hacker way code wins argument the best idea in in when because mark Zuckerberg didn't have to be taught these lessons they were instinct created Facebook he grabbed Lennix he grabbed free software he created the world's largest social he was following a form of collaboration that has introduced an
entirely new genre of the way that people can get things done in this new genre of collaboration can be summed up in a simple idea all of us are smarter then any one of us because you see there's a whole generation code poets out there working furiously poets who love what they do who may not always get along but are creating the next Google in the
next Facebook these individuals have created the coal and steel of the information age and instead of that coal and steel being owned by the Carnegie's it's owned by everyone that is the future future is a world in which you can enrich yourself all at the same time in rich it's going to be a pretty good place and in that world and I have to admit talking
