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BBC Interviews Linus Torvalds
chrisseaton writes "The BBC has an interview with Linus Torvalds. It's a little thin, but good to see something like this in a decent mainstream news source."
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"No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal," he said.
Linus, You're a cool dude.
Is it just me or did Tux gain weight ?
This article is just excerpts from a much more substantial video interview on BBC world. Ironically, the video interview is only available in Windows media, and the page doesn't display properly in Mozilla :-)
I don't have to imagine anything.
Here is a BBC interview with RMS.
I thought it was great, but then again, I like RMS.
There's not really a way to say this without making people groan... moderators, do your worst:
The reason RMS carps endlessly about the GNU project deserving credit it, quite simply, that the FSF did most of the work that resulted in "Linux." Linus originally set out to write a Unix clone from scratch (a small hobbyist one, not "big and professional like gnu"), but for a variety of reasons the project scaled back to writing a kernel and a handful of userland kernel-glue (insmod, iptables, etc.), and "Linux" distributions are based on GNU userlands -- the C library, compiler toolchain, shell, basic Unix utilities, and desktop (if Gnome) are all GNU things. They make a fairly coherent whole, provide basic system services such as fopen() and ls, and define the user's interface with the computer (bash or Gnome) -- XFree86 and Linux (the kernel) are as essential as GNU is, but they're smaller and they do less to directly define the operation of the system.
The GNU/Linux beef is one thing (language is inaccurate; koala bears aren't really bears), but calling Linus "the inventor of the Linux operating system" is about like crediting NT to the team that wrote KERNEL32.DLL. RMS spent more than a decade of his life setting up an organization which still puts out voluminous Free code, and crippled himself with RSI writing code to give away, and I see high-modded posts here that treat him with more contempt than I've ever seen aimed at Jack Valenti or Fritz Hollings.
You've heard this all before, of course, and you're probably sick of it by now -- it's only the slow and plodding truth, and it has no punchline. Worst of all, it takes itself seriously, just like RMS. I really can't think of a short or funny way, though, to explain how wrong it is to shit on the guy who had the idea for the GPL, who argued with the world for years until the idea of open source software started to take hold, who at the time Linux was started had written a lot of the existing Free code personally, and who is directly responsible for the userland most of you supposedly use -- that's not RMS trying to grab credit for someone else's work, that's simply the way it happened, the truth.
Not funny, and not sexy like "Finnish teenager writes OS in basement; world stunned." But true.