#Linus Torvalds in ascii art easy software

In the conversation with then CEO Pat Gelsinger, we decided what would be my goals, what I would be working on. What brought you to the decision that it was time to move on?ĭirk Hohndel: I joined VMware five-and-a-half years ago and set out with a fairly specific set of goals. You spent the last five years there, and I think it caught a lot of people by surprise when you tweeted that you were leaving, because I think a lot of people assumed that you were going to be there for a long, long time. Our talk has been lightly edited for readability, and starts with me questioning why he suddenly left VMware.įOSS Force: Let’s start by talking about your leaving VMware. We ended up talking for the better part of an hour, most of which is included here because he had a lot of really interesting things to say that I just couldn’t leave on the cutting room floor. He agreed, but wanted to wait until after he was officially gone from VMware, and in early March we sat down to a Zoom meeting for what I thought would be a quick, down-and-dirty 20 minute interview on the whys and wherefores of leaving VMware, and perhaps a little bit about Linux and open source. When Hohndel suddenly announced in January that he was leaving VMware earlier this year because “I had completed the job I set out to do,” I immediately pinged him to see about an interview.

#Linus Torvalds in ascii art easy software

He’s been involved in other open source projects as well, notably as the maintainer of XFree86 for a while, and since 2012 maintaining Subsurface, a logging and planning software project for scuba divers created by his friend Torvalds. Just hitting the high points, he was the Chief Technology Office at SUSE from 1995-2001, brought open source to Intel as the chipmaker’s chief Linux and open source technologist from 2001-2016, and did the same for VMware as a VP and chief open source officer from 2016 until January of this year. His resume would get him a listing in Who’s Who in Linux and Open Source, if there were such a thing.

He’s been involved with Linux almost from the beginning, and he’s the person who was hand-picked by Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, to interview him each year at Open Source Summit. You would be hard pressed to find anybody in open source circles who hasn’t heard of Dirk Hohndel, who’s been involved in open source since…well, since back before there was “open source”. Dirk Hohndel interviews Linus Torvalds at Open Source Summit 2021. In this interview, Hohndel opines about the mistakes some proprietary companies make when they attempt to go open, the recent spate of “source available” licenses, how he came to be the one to interview Linus Torvalds at Open Source Summit every year, and more.