By this logic, janitorial work should trump the Linux kernel -- there are far more janitors out there than Linux developers. Janitors are everywhere. We rely on them all the time.
The difference between the lunar missions and the Linux kernel is easy to see, if you bother to pay attention. Decades of research in numerous fields were required before the Apollo missions could happen. Experts in numerous fields had to collaborate on the mission. There were no mistakes to learn from -- nobody had done a lunar mission before. By comparison, the Linux kernel only represents expertise in one particular field, it is certainly not the result of cutting-edge research, and there is nothing particularly special about writing a kernel.
Decades of research in numerous fields were required before the Apollo missions could happen.
Actually, it was less than one decade of research post-Kennedy's-announcement, and a lot of groundwork had already been laid by then. The whole thing was standing on the shoulders of giants from day one. It's really difficult to pick any single ground-breaking development in the Apollo project; it was more like a lot of R&D trickle in disparate areas converging on a solution for a single goal, all of which was being built on a solid foundation we had already had by that time.
For example, the Apollo Guidance Computer was, AFAIK, the first serially produced digital computer made of integrated circuits, and I believe that for quite some time, the manufacturers of ACGs in the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (an offshoot of MIT) were the single largest purchaser of ICs on this planet. The consequence was that the use of ICs in complex computers had been validated, Fairchild Semiconductor (who provided the NOR gates used in the computer) amortized their investments and went on churning them out in ever increasing numbers. You know what followed. But this was more about speeding up the adoption rather then stimulating the development of something completely new.
Experts in numerous fields had to collaborate on the mission.
Since it's a software project, you could also argue that you need experts in various fields of programming. The guy who writes a driver for a new device manufactured by his employer to be included in the mainline kernel probably isn't somenone who you're going to trust with redesigning the kernel memory allocator.
I agree with you. Linux is possibly a bad example, there's nothing special about writing it.
That said, we have made major progress in many fields and I disagree that nothing important is done anymore. Consumer aviation comes to mind. The safety standards they have met is truly mind boggling. Wireless and Internet Connectivity is another - wimax has a huge impact in developing countries. IMO, just these two things have made massive impact on how we do things in everyday life. Much more than the space program to daily life.
I suppose it depends on how you interpret the term "big project." Deploying wireless networking seems comparable to the Interstate Highway System -- you are laying down a new infrastructure to make a particular technology more efficient. It is certainly ambitious and it certainly has a lasting impact, and you definitely need expertise and a commitment to finish it. On the other hand, you do not need the breadth of expertise that Apollo required, which is where I think the line is drawn here.
An example of something comparable to Apollo (one that does not involve outer space) would be a hypothetical switch away from fossil fuels -- completely renewable energy. Imagine a government project to replace every internal combustion engine with electric, to deploy rapid (on the scale of minutes) charging infrastructure, to build wind and solar farms to replace coal/gas power, to find new ways to heat blast furnaces, etc. You would need research in numerous science and engineering fields, and you would need experts in those fields working together. You would need a commitment to doing this, the way we committed to Apollo -- not a wishy-washy federal effort or a lot of poorly-organized local efforts.
I agree with you. Linux is possibly a bad example, there's nothing special about writing it.
Are you sure about it? Wasn't it one of the first really large software projects with the distributed development model? (Were there any predecessors to that?)
By the time Linux was born, the GNU project had produced a large collection of tools, enough to have its founder claim that the last major missing piece for it to be a complete OS was a kernel.
Well, yes, but the individual GNU tools are to a large degree independent. I'm not an insider, but to me it seemed that the kernel development effort really pushed the limits in the area of distributed development of a single large code base. (I'm not sure, though, how exactly did the kernel code base measure with the contemporary GCC code base, which is probably the closest in complexity from all the GNU stuff.)
Some background:
"At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities."
Sure the Linux kernel is a valuable project but in terms of engineering effort IMHO the comparison isn't fair.
Can't cosign this one, I think its a grave underestimation of the import of a species being able to escape however briefly from their home planet.
100 years from now, linux will probably have gone the way of the doodoo bird, certainly by 500 years from now it will have... 500 years from now the question of whether or not man has ever set foot on the moon, and when that first occurred will still have impact
I completely agree. A million years from now, there will likely still be human artifacts on the moon. Where will the linux kernel be in a million years?
>100 years from now, linux will probably have gone the way of the doodoo bird
Based on my car this morning, "doodoo birds" are alive and well. But I do agree with your main point - to quote Carl Sagan, humanity for now is forced to "make its stand on Earth". We have all of our proverbial eggs in one basket and nowhere to go if problems arise.
The Linux kernel is a complete unknown to the vast majority of people on the planet, and touches the lives of such a small percentage of the 7 billion people here. Find someone on Earth that's unfamiliar with the moon or the colossal achievement it would be of having landed a man on its surface and brought him safely back to the Earth. Most cultures unfamiliar with the technology would think you were a god; the Linux kernel pales in comparison.
The Linux kernel is a complete unknown to the vast majority of people on the planet, yes. But it runs so much of the Internet behind the scenes that I don't think it's fair to say that it only touches the lives of "a small percentage" of the people. Not everyone, to be sure, and depending on how many levels of indirection you consider to be valid, perhaps not even half. But undoubtedly more than can really be called a "small percentage."
>The Linux kernel is a complete unknown to the vast majority of people on the planet, yes. But it runs so much of the Internet behind the scenes that I don't think it's fair to say that it only touches the lives of "a small percentage" of the people
I encourage you to reconsider your position on this. Look for yourself here:
There are 7 billion people on the planet. Of that 7 billions, 2.4 billion use the Internet. That's 34.3% of people that don't even use the Internet, let alone have their lives touched by the Linux kernel.
Then you add to it that if it were not Linux running a server, it would be another operating system that would've been that particular system administrator's second preference.
The Linux kernel is an amazing thing, but it doesn't compare to the moon landing. As I said, the majority of people in the world would think you were a god if you landed on the moon and returned safely.
2/3 of the people in the world wouldn't even notice if Linux was never invented since they don't even use the Internet. The percentage of people that use the Internet and are impacted even indirectly by Linux is even smaller.
>But they're still affected by people who do use the Internet.
Frankly, I don't understand this position at all. A poor person in India who has never used the Internet and has probably never heard of the Internet is not in any way affected by people who use the Internet. And anyway, that's a shift of the goal post. The point is that such a person is not touched by the Linux kernel.
No offense, I think people trying to say the Linux kernel is as important as the moon landing are suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Multiple people died in the pursuit of landing a man on the moon (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1). Saying people creating a competing offering to something that had been created dozens of times before is as monumental of an achievement as landing on the moon is frankly preposterous.
I too wanted to dismiss it outright, there are some big differences and the first is that simply not that many people really work on Linux.
As I ponder it though, I think it becomes more challenging. Linux' emergence has changed the psychology of the software industry and other industries. You really have to ponder before Linux and after Linux to start to capture the magnitude. Before linux, when you bought a computer you paid a company to make it boot and make it usable. If you wanted to seriously program your PC, you had a relatively small set of options: C, Pascal, Assembly, maybe BASIC and then some like databasey type programming platforms of sorts. You had to pay money to get those tools, not a small amount. You want to look under the hood? Go to a university and maybe that'll scratch that itch. Programmers were the nerdiest of the nerds, now they have a degree of coolness in society (a small one but still some and they make movies about Hackers and stuff.) Things were just very different, Linux and GNU and others have had and made a gigantic and revolutionary impact that really has changed the way software dudes think. Maybe GNU would have done this if Linux didn't show up. Maybe something else would have come along, seems like there is a social component and people were ready for it to happen.
That being said, they barely had computers and landed some dudes on the moon, that was some real fucking cowboy shit. Strapping dudes on to a bomb, controllably blowing it up and launching them to the moon and then bringing them back? Alive, with relatively low casualties. That's really big, a whole lot of people making careers out of that work and a whole lot of luck. The luck makes me think of it as bigger, if we did it 100 more times, I know we would have killed a lot more people in the process and it would have maybe looked a bit more reckless in retrospect.
The Alcatel-Lucent 5ESS switch code is larger, more mature, has probably had more developers over its lifetime, and still, pretty much, runs the whole phone network.
"This is a silly game show to play, but if I had to choose between a Saturn V with three dudes and a lunar landing module strapped to the top of it and a DVD with the Linux kernel, I’d point to the DVD as having a bigger impact."
I think he should have stopped after the first comma. Why compare incomparable things? Pick one axis, thing A is better. Pick another axis, thing B is better.
The author seems to have some sort of conceptualized ideal regarding "The Linux kernel" and it's ubiquity, even though the wide array of devices using some variant of "The Linux kernel" illustrates the fractured nature of Linux and its myriad incarnations.
Some would say that "The Linux kernel" is a bloated monstrosity and not a good example of technological wizardry.
To state that The kernel is the largest, most complex collaborative effort in the history of the species, while failing to note that the typical jet fighter aircraft uses systems which nearly double the SLOC of a Linux kernel, also serves to illuminate the author's scope of knowledge.
*The latest F-35Bs, including Yuma’s copy, are also flying with a temporary software suite known as Block 1B. The Marines have said the jet won’t be capable of flying and fighting in real combat until it has the Block 2B software that is only now entering testing. With 24 million lines of code — 9 million more than originally envisioned — there’s no telling how long testing could take.*
Sorry. Wrong. If we were to undertake a serious challenge, like get to Mars, or go 100% renewable power in 15 years, I'd take that over the linux kernel any day all day.
I totally agree with this post,but the reasons people think this way is obvious. It's much easier to look at a ginormous rocket blasting off in a fiery cloud of steam and crushing noise as something BIG, than it is to see an operating system kernel as big.
I suspect a lot of us are very uncomfortable with that claim. I think the moonshot and the kernel are both independently amazing feats that don't need to be compared against one another for validation.
I think the issue is that to the average person, there is nothing inspiring about the linux kernel.
The space race created a large amount of respect for science/research in the public eye - something that results in more kids enrolled in science and math programs. The long tail effect of sending people to the moon is a lot hard to measure than KLOC.
> I think the issue is that to the average person, there is nothing inspiring about the linux kernel.
There's nothing inspiring to a non-average person either, it's not like the linux kernel is a work of discovery and greatness. It's nice, it's a free unix, it's everywhere and it's convenient, but it's not really blazing new trails or anything.
And if the linux kernel didn't exist, people would be using something else. Most of the mindshare would probably live in FreeBSD since Linux gained its ground and staked its early marks during the BSD uncertainties of the early 90s.
Maybe I am reading this wrong. It seems to be about the US, as opposed to humanity, not having done anything important in a while:
"the fact that the US doesn’t have a manned spaceflight program is a step back. But then he said, “our generation hasn’t done anything like land someone on the Moon… we used to do big things.”"
Then he goes on to put-up Linux as an example of the US (???) having done something great? Did I read that wrong?
Linux is not a US development. It didn't even start in the US. It's the result of collaboration from nearly every corner of the world.
As for humanity not having done something great. Please. Billions of people are connected like never before via the Internet. Never in the history of mankind was the dissemination of information, knowledge and culture accessible to so many for so little. And this is just the beginning.
I don't think US vs. humanity was the point of the article. The argument stays the same if you replace it with any other popular (technical) achievement in the country you are talking about ("Wirtschaftswunder" in Germany, Concorde in France, ... I don't know any others. Ignorant me.).
Still, your conclusion is absolutely right and exactly what is expressed in the article with the example of the Linux Kernel.
Erm...author isn't taking into account like any of the spinoff tech from the space race, are they?
Linux was a hobby OS that popped up right as legal concerns starting hurting the BSD folks, right? Had that not been the case, it probably would've been as interesting a footnote as Minix or Hurd is today.
Are they just feeling insecure about the kinds of problems their generation is solving?
The difference between the lunar missions and the Linux kernel is easy to see, if you bother to pay attention. Decades of research in numerous fields were required before the Apollo missions could happen. Experts in numerous fields had to collaborate on the mission. There were no mistakes to learn from -- nobody had done a lunar mission before. By comparison, the Linux kernel only represents expertise in one particular field, it is certainly not the result of cutting-edge research, and there is nothing particularly special about writing a kernel.