Torvalds Removes Himself as Maintainer of Linux Kernel 4.19 | eWeek

Torvalds Steps Back From Linux Leadership to Fix ‘Tooling’ Issues

Daily Tech Briefing Sept. 20
Written By
eWEEK Staff
eWEEK Staff
Sep 20, 2018
2 minute read
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Today’s topics include Linus Torvalds temporarily stepping back from Linux kernel 4.19 for personal reasons, and CloudBees announcing the CloudBees Suite for DevOps software delivery.

Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux operating system, made a surprise announcement on Sept. 16, revealing that he is stepping back from his role as the maintainer of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel release in order to improve his behavior.

Torvalds has always been known to have strong opinions on issues and hasn’t always used the politest language or approaches to communicate those opinions, but he said he now sees the need to step back to focus on improving his own empathy to others. “I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow,” Torvalds said.


In his stead, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who currently maintains the stable branch of the Linux kernel, will step up and manage the rest of the Linux 4.19 release cycle.

Torvalds said he expects to return for future releases.

CloudBees announced on Sept. 18 at the DevOps World/Jenkins World conference in San Francisco the new CloudBees Suite that it says will help companies of all sizes streamline the software development process.

A central piece of the new software is the CloudBees Core for unified governance of continuous delivery operations and processes used in DevOps. Software pipelines can also use Core to run more efficiently in a self-managed way in the cloud or on-premises. CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said Core is designed to help bring more order to the process in terms of compliance and governance.

The CloudBees Suite is also designed to be an easy way for smaller teams or organizations to ramp up software delivery with a software-as-a-service-based solution, and can help enterprises move fast and scale continuous development and DevOps with unified governance.

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