Linus Torvalds
LinuxWorld has an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds, Q&A: Torvalds on Linux, Microsoft, software's future. I recommend reading it. Linus comes across as a no-nonsense, I'm-not-going-to-get-involved-in-all-that-FUD, just-let-me-write-interesting-code, type guy:
"First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need?"
Here are three things I found interesting in the article.
- He said good things about the role companies play in open source:
The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers, and pushed people to improve usability etcetera, and I think commercial users of Linux have been very important in actually improving the product. I think all the technical people who have been involved have been hugely important, but I think that the kind of commercial use that you can get with the GPLv2 is also important — you need a balance between pure technology, and the kinds of pressures you get from users through the market.
- Having had several conversations with people that were reluctant to open source their baby, I appreciated this quote:
First off, even if you're the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it's really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don't worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They'll probably not even know about your work, and they'll certainly not think that it's worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can't really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught.
- He also tried to separate the open source software movement from the anti-Microsoft movement:
And the whole open source thing is not an anti-MS movement either. … Open source is a model for how to do things, and I happen to believe that it's just a much better way to do things and that open source will take over not because of any battle, but simply because better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things
Check out the interview to get a better sense of who Linus is.
