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Linus Torvalds about SCO, IP, MS and Transmeta

Posted by michael on from the smorgasbord dept.

strmcrw writes " San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Linus. He talks about about SCO vs IBM and gives his opinion on Microsoft. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the Open Source Development Lab."

2 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. The Linux "Operating System" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:

    Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux operating system, the open source version of Unix that is sweeping through the software world in a direct challenge to Microsoft.

    [Emphasis mine]


    From Rob's own http://cmdrtaco.net/ :

    What? You haven't heard of Linux? It's an operating system created by Linus Torvalds, and a band of hacks scattered accross the globe.

    [Emphasis mine]


    Sorry GNU/FSF/RMS. You're like Rodney Dangerfield; you never get respect...

  2. At risk of being modded as flamebait... by Big+Sean+O · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think GNU did themselves a disservice back in the late 80s/early 90s by not getting HURD written sooner.

    If that had happened then they could have named it whatever RMS wanted. Instead Linus cobbled together Linux, GPL'd the source, and pretty much stole the show as far as naming the operating system.

    Yet, much of the success of GNU is the freedom to distribute it WITHOUT permission of RMS (just as long as you provide the source code...). Of course, you can do this with non-GPL code too (*BSD, perl, python) but RMS hacked the copyright system first.

    So the real success story is that GNU's bash can be used with Linux, Windows (under Cygnus), or with Mac OS X. RMS might have lost the battle (over GNU/Linux), but he certainly won the war (bash is just one successful example).

    --
    My father is a blogger.