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Interview With Linus
Hairy1 writes " Cisco has an interview with Linus which discusses among other things his thoughts - or rather lack of thoughts - about Windows.
When asked about Microsoft he said - "Well, I don't know. I'm actually not a big Microsoft basher... They're very good at marketing. They're very good at trying to see What do we have to do to sell this? The bad part about it is that it does have a huge market share. And that means that it can be lazy, sort of. They don't have much competition on the desktop, which means that they have very little incentive to really fix some of the problems it does have.""
Good call by Linus. In the post XP world today, it really is a good thing to be able to sit down at the end of the day and not really care about Microsoft as a corporate entity.
As long as there are people that can still do this (and who also possess L33T HAX0R SK1LZ) there will never be a true monopoly in the operating systems market.
-ERTW (EngScis Rule The World)
I just realized how true this is - My girlfriends mother was visiting this weekend, she has no computer, and indeed has never actually used a computer. She was wondering if Mandrake was Windows XP since she HAD heard of that..
air and light and time and space
I'm really glad to see that Linus didn't have too many ill words for MS. I think we could probably all stand to learn from his restraint. I think the whole Linux community would benefit very much if we gave up this Linux vs. the world attitude, no matter how romantic it may be, and just focus on our own community and what we can do to make Linux better. Reading throughout that interview I really got a feeling that Linus truly does appreciate the true hacker spirit in that he does his work "Just for Fun", like it used to be back in the 60's when the MIT boys would hack up the PDP-10 late at night.
I posted to
cloning the windows interface for linux still involves a lot of work, and I would not call the people who are trying to do this lazy. Microsoft is already at that point, and all they need to do it make a few tweaks and add drivers every year or so, so they can release a new version and continue generating income.
Not that I am in favor of the Windowsization of Linux interfaces, but I don't think that it is lazy. All of that coding is hard work, but also rewarding to those who do it.
Do you really think CISCO.com is going to be /.'ed enough to need a mirror?
Relevant quote from the article:
I was the technology guy who had no clue about business.
He admits that he does not know enough to have a good opinion, so he keeps it to himself. *Sniff* ... smells like "maturity" to me ...
I would also like to know Linus's true opinion on the matter, but his voice carries a lot more force than an unknown's voice (like mine!), would. That means that he has a responsibility to be more careful in what he says than I have to be.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
I thought this was going to be a different interview... :-(. Something where they don't ask Linus a bunch of questions that he A)doesn't really care about and B)doesn't really know. In fact after I was done reading it, I could of swore I saw the same interview on pbs over the summer, roughly june or so. Typical linus interview:
:Could you if you want to?
:What about microsoft, how much do you really really hate them?
:Are you sure you don't want bill gates head on a stick?
:No. So about Microsoft and money...
:You own linux?
:No
:No
:Huh...??? I couldn't care less
:Ok, this is stupid... don't you want to ask me about the decision about andre vs rick's VM system... or potential changes for 2.5?
So when are people going to get it through their minds that he doesn't care... i've never met the man, never spoken to him... but from all the interviews i've heard and read thats the conclusion that i've come to. Linux cares about tinkering... creating... and programming. Basically the technology. He doesn't care about business... *sigh*. I would love to hear an interview on technology with him... that would be incredible. I remember in that pbs show, the interviewer actually asked him how he got started programming... and you could see him get excited and start talking about an old video game he wrote way back in the day. Aww... I wouldn't have him any other way.
ps - I think the interviewers need to read up on some of linus's quotes, my personal fav being
"I'm a bastard and proud of it"... closely followed by:
"If you didn't read my last post, go back and do it and make sure to read the line about me being a bastard twice".
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Whenever I've met someone of major technical merit in the Linux comunity (AC, Raph Levine, George and Marceij from Eazel, Taj from KDE) they've always been clear headed and non religious about their choice of OS. They don't really like Windows, but they're not `against it' per se and they don't have a problem with Windows users - they just prefer Linux for their own use. Gearing reaports that Linus and Ted Tso have similar attitutes doesn't surprise me.
Unfortunately its the few who do turn a technical argument into a religious one that give the rest of us a bad name and get the attention from the media. I still believe the majority of Linux users choose it because its the best tool for the job, not because Windows is evil and wrong and completely technically inferior (becuase it isn't).
However, that doesn't make much of a story for the media, and doesn't give the trolls something to talk about. Hence the nasty reputation of the ranting Linux zealot. This sucks.
In the interview there is a comparison between Gates and Torvalds where Torvalds is compared to Edison and Gates to Rockefeller. I'm not sure that either is very much like Torvalds. Edison was quite into marketing his ideas and wasn't beneath slandering his competitors (such as Tesla). Torvalds isn't at all like that. I'd say Torvalds is more like Bill Thompson (a.k.a Lord Kelvin after the Brits honored him). Thompson contributed a lot to the public knowledge of physics but at the same time supported himself through engineering contracts, much like Torvalds works on Linux for the public but supports himself by working at Transmeta.
In this case you are right, but earlier he has been slightly more bitchy. Like this one, where Linus respons to Mundie which cracked me up:
"I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less."
Although it was a funny quote, IMO Linus went too far with it. I'm sure all the Linux geeks giggled, but it's just not very professional, and if we want Linux to have a clean image (I do), than we gotta have a clean fight - not a cat fight.
-Kraft
Live and let live
This is something that we seem to forget. Windows and MS are not all that evil. Just a monopoly. And this leads to a lack of effort in attempting to improve their product, no competition you see.
If we want to see MS lose their massive market share there needs to be a product capable of competing with Windows. As much as I love Linux, this is not the OS. Linux is a server OS, whereas Windows is a desktop OS. So to compete with Windows, there must be an open source desktop OS. Sadly there is only one other desktop OS right now, and thats macOS. Unfortunatly I have yet to see such project even discussed, let alone acted on.
---
Kwanza is not a Polish holiday!
Videos episodes of the Charlie Rose show can be ordered from http://www.800-all-news.com/transcripts.shtml. Their online search engine doesn't return values up to the present, so you'll either have to do it over the phone (1-800-255-6397) or via email ( web-orders@800-ALL-NEWS.com. Since you get something of a discount when ordering multiple transcripts, you might also want to order last May's episode where Charlie Rose interviewed Linus about his book.
It's Cisco, the load balanceing king. Nobody had better see any slashdot effect on this story or we're all doomed.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
You'll be lucky to find an interview with Linus Torvalds in which the interviewer does not ask him his stance on Windows or Bill Gates or Microsoft. He always has the same humble and modest response.
Linus has stated that he does not try to be a threat to Microsoft and he does not view MS as competition. It would indeed be an steep uphill battle for Linux to be a competitor in the home computing world (whether you like it or not).
Some people are so blind in their love for a certain OS, whether it be Windows or BSD or Linux or Mac OS or Unix, that they won't admit the truth. Windows and Linux have a different goal.
Torvalds has stated that he was interested at Windows NT at one point. He says lately it looks more and more like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. That is what does not interest him. In an interview he said "In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems." And maybe he is right.
BTW: Somebody might want to format that post a little better, it has awkward page breaks all over.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Whenever I've met someone of major technical merit in the Linux comunity (AC, Raph Levine, George and Marceij from Eazel, Taj from KDE) they've always been clear headed and non religious about their choice of OS. They don't really like Windows, but they're not `against it' per se and they don't have a problem with Windows users - they just prefer Linux for their own use.
One word: politics. Do you really believe that the major players in the Linux / free software community don't have complete overthrow of the proprietary software "regime" in the back of their minds when they say such things? It's only a matter of time. Cut the crap with that 'best tool for the job' business. And yes, greed is evil and wrong.
Very nice article.
Rose: What's the best and worst thing you can say about Windows?
Rose: I didn't ask you to bash 'em.
Torvalds: Well, you did ask me to say something bad about them.
That is great. It shows someone who not only understands himself, but he understands the world around him. He's not drawn into petty bickering, and he is obviously not so filled with hate or angst. It's quite obvious he wants to make a good product, but also doesn't seem to be swept up in material gain above what he may or may not have. I remember when I first started using Linux and was introduced to ipfw in Redhat 5.something. I was truly shown something technically refreshing. While I encourage desktop GUI pursuits, many a Linux contributor seems to be caught up in widgets and not solving real problems or addressing new ideas. I don't mean that GUI's is every contributor's focus, but it seems to be the main thrust.
Linux will be truly successful if it can go places *before* Microsoft can, and do them better than Microsoft can. It wouldn't help to have a couple Rockefellers to help out the cause.
I did a word count after separating their two threads of dialog into different files and removing the leading names from their lines.
Final counts:
Torvalds - 1669
Rose - 456
Never let facts get in the way of looking stupid though...
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Who does he think he is?
Someone with a better sense of humor than you?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How is the job at McDonald's going? :)
The lead programmers probably don't care.
But the personality leaders(ESR, RMS, etc) certainly care and push the trolling to the edge of reason.
Well, we could all hope that the next interviewer will read slashdot, before asking the questions.
:)
Therefore we could collect a few questions for Linus.
Like:
What about Andrea vs Rick's VM system?
What important changes are already planned for 2.5?
Could you think of a situation/decision where other issues (like ego) went to be more important than the technical issues?
What do you do with your time besides working at Transmeta and hacking on Linux?
Then again, it would even be nicer if Slashdot could collect 10 questions for the next Slashdot interview
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Curious parallel, at a time when we're entering a major war that's essentially a religious argument. There is no OS but Windows and Gates is its prophet. There is no freedom but American and Bush is its prophet. There is no god but Allah and bin Laden is his prophet.
Maybe, on a certain level, these all are religious wars. We are somehow in cultures that want one answer to be a total answer: one god, one OS, one brand of freedom, one superpower. Okay, we don't all want that. Some of us are happier in a world with many gods, many OSes, many freedoms, diverse powers. But that's why bin Laden, Gates, Falwell see us as decadent and evil.
So if there's a deeper psycho-social vortex that sucks so many members of our cultures in mono-moniacle delusions, whether of the defeated fascist kind, the waning communist kind, or the ascendant worship at the temples of Microsoft and Disney ... well, don't we have to somehow ease the effects of that deeper vortex if we're to get on with our personal choices of OSs and goddesses and musics and causes to die for, and not be sucked into the looming battles of the competing vortexes, each of which believes not just in its immortality, but that, "There can be only one!"
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
What's the point in hating (in a personal, emotional, sense) a computer program?
Antipathy towards MicroSoft-the-company's a different thing, though, as individuals run it and individuals are responsible for the fact that it seems to have no respect for the laws of the United States. Which happens to be my country. As a citizen of this country, it is perfectly reasonable for me to loath the company and its leadership for its business practices.
But hate Windows, per se? Like most folks, I need to use it from time to time, and other Microsoft products. Some of them work well enough, none of them are worth hating.
In a world where MicroSoft acted as a responsible corporate citizen I would have no problem with them. My feelings about their software would be unchanged - hey, Win2K's a lot more stable than NT, cool! - but my feelings about their company would be a *lot* different.
We in the Linux community - and in the world at large - have every reason in the world to dislike MicroSoft-the-company.
What is there to like about a corporation that falsified evidence in court? That ignores consent decrees? Whose very success is due to their having violated a contract with two programmers in Seattle (who'd written what became the basis for DOS)?
Do you really believe that the major players in the Linux / free software community don't have complete overthrow of the proprietary software "regime" in the back of their minds when they say such things?
,seems fair enough given their busines practices). Ted Tso does brilliant work on making the Linux kernel better but has stated before that his wife will continue to use Quicken for her accounting because its, well, better than the alternatives. Linux, from this interview, doesn't hate MS, the GNOME and KDE people can recognize good ideas from other OSs an integrate them into their respective desktops (and hopefully reject the bad ones).
To some extent - the technical ones would like for Linux to replace Windows in every situation, but they don't hate Windows or Windows users on some personal level or see that Linux can replace Windows in every way (hating Microsoft, OTOH
A follow up poster put it simply: the difference between the silent technical types working away making Linux am even more viable alternative and the ranting `Windows is inferior in every way and must die now' folk is maturity. I'm inclined to agree.
1. Are you sick of giving interviews? ...or do both at the same time?
...about Bill Gates?
...about commercializing Linux?
:)
2. Are you sick of being asked the same questions?
3. Would you rather code, or drink a beer?
4.
5. Do you code better while half-drunk?
6. Do you code better when fully drunk?
7. Would you drive a stake through my heart if
I asked you about microsoft?
8.
9.
10. Do you regret linux's popularity in regards to
the fact that you've been forced into the
position of "geek god"
11. Does RMS get on your nerves as much as he does mine?
12. If you're ever in tennessee, would you consider hanging out with me?
13. What are the odds of the windows API's ever getting kernal support for running windows apps natively?
e-mail: mccann@telalink.net
Linus - if you're out there, answer these questions: Inquiring minds want to know!
I'm honestly impressed with Linus' reaction towards MS. I don't really like/use Linux, but respect its creator, I'm more of a Windows guy because I don't have the time to devote to learning a new OS at the moment. However, the rampant OS-bashing from both sides going on is relatively petty, and Linus seems to realize it isn't worth anything.
People expect Linux to work like Microsoft. They expect the same windows/mouse/pointer user interface. There's plenty of innovation, but people don't want it. For example, we in the open source world have Pie Menus. They are measureably better (faster and more reliable) than Microsoft's linear menus. If you give people a choice between pie menus and linear menus, which do you think they'll choose?
They'll choose the one that requires the least retraining on their part. THAT is why Microsoft products get cloned.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
They're slashdotted.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
According to this, this interview appears to be from last May 18th.
I suppose it could be a different one, but it's a Charlie Rose interview that discusses the same topics.
Personally, I really hope that Linus and the others really are just in category A. Because I think that when people are focused on improving linux and not destroying microsoft the development of the OS will be much better.
Microsoft works its ass off until it owns a given market, then it gets lazy. Let's look at some of the examples you gave:
:-)
Windows XP: Windows 2000 with new applications relevant to markets it wants to control (digital imaging, instant messaging) welded into the OS, along with bugfixes, eye candy, and irritating anti-piracy crap built in so they can squeeze consumers with multiple PCs.
Office XP: Stepping stone towards Office.Net, where if you wanna run the spellchecker, it'll cost ya.
XBox: Sony and Nintendo are splitting a huge pie, Microsoft wants as big a piece of it as they can get.
Pocket PC 2002: Microsoft hasn't killed off Palm yet.
~Philly
But the reason it will eventually succeed is that Microsoft can't compete against it, can't put it out of business. It will eventually succeed because it cannot be stopped.
By the way, I just got Mandrake 8.1 and the desktop looks phenomenal. Once the office products start to mature and we see some more games I think the desktop will start seeing market share numbers like Linux on the server. You have to understand, the server has 30 years of development behind it. The desktop will eventually get there. Its not a question of if, but when.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The lazy part came from the original message head. I agree with you about the difference between hard work and innovation.
But hate Windows, per se? Like most folks, I need to use it from time to time, and other Microsoft products. Some of them work well enough, none of them are worth hating.
Karl Fogel, author of The CVS Book, points out that open-source software is designed differently than closed source software. He makes many rather insightful observations in the odd numbered chapters (in the printed book) about how open-source software is different. I spent a few minutes searching for a couple great quotes... but saddly his text is heavily designed towards a tutorial and not a reference.
One of the really important differences is that open-source software is designed to expose to the user a good conceptual model of how it works and what it's really doing internally. Perhaps this is because the author of the code also designs the user interface, but it's often times done this way so that users can understand the inner workings of the program, at least in a conceptual way, and perhaps become involved in the coding. (Karl's CVS book is well worth the money for the chapters that aren't downloadable if you're interested in the reasons for these sort of design issues)
Now some might argue that users are better off on a "need to know" basis, and the point of software is to bundle up all algorithms so the user doesn't need to worry about them. People who feel this way probably like closed source software quite a bit and it seems likely they would be uncomfortable using many open source programs.
Personally, I quite like having a deeper understanding of what software is really doing. Sometimes I don't bother to read the finer details, but it's nice to know that they are there and available should I want to know. It's empowering to have that sort of information readily available (as well as the source code itself) should I have questions or run into complex problems. It is more work than calling some tech support number, but investing the time to read about and learn what is really going on almost always leads to better solutions that some lame tech support help desk could provide, and (at least for me) I end up with a better long-term knowledge base.
After many years, particularly in the modern age of thriving open/free software, it's easy to get very used to this sort of openness, where the source is provided, and the design of the program and its documentation is such that you can really learn and understand what it's really doing. It's easy to get used to having command line switches or config files where you can really control things, and documentation that explains not just the "what", but also the "how" and "why" behind the configurable parameters.
It really does become easy to hate closed software, where the innards are some proprietary secret. It becomes easy to truely hate the overall design of "no servicable parts inside", where you get only a few simple dialog boxes to choose only a couple basic parameters, and even the "advanced" dialogs don't really provide access to really control much. It's easy to hate documentation which is a giant inventory of the radio buttions and check boxes, with simple brain-dead descriptions of each that would have been obvious, without any information about how the software really works.
That is the reason I hate Microsoft Windows "per se". Actually, Windows itself isn't so bad... you can actually learn quite a bit about how it works internally (I have a couple good books on the topic), and there are lots of good 3rd party tools that can give access to much of the internal workings. Still, it is the overall closed design that I personally hate about much of the world's closed source software.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The man has no opinion about anything. What a wimp!
How does he decide what's for dinner???
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK