Interview with Linus Torvalds from NYT Magazine

aelfric35 writes "David Diamond drills Linus on topics from filesharing (sharing is good) to SCO (trying to claim paternity on his child) to his rivalry with Bill Gates (doesn't care enough to be a nemesis) in next week's New York Times Magazine."

Comments

Re:HElloe

[Snowspinner]

Oh, please, let me metamoderate this one...

So much distortion in so few words.

[jbn-o]

From the article's first question:

"You gave Linux, the operating system, to the world free, in effect jump-starting the open-source movement."

First, Linux is not an operating system and it never was. What Linus Torvalds began was a kernel -- a necessary and valuable portion of a complete GNU/Linux operating system, but not the entirety of it. Linux is now being collectively developed by many people around the world, including Torvalds. In 1984, Richard Stallman began working on GNU years before Torvalds began working on what would become Linux. Many people would join Stallman and develop that operating system. Second, According to the Open Source Initiative, the Open Source movement was a reaction to Netscape releasing the source code for its web browser. It was this act that "jump-start[ed]" the Open Source movement. The people who started that movement did so in 1998, seven years after Torvalds released Linux.

Downfall of MS

[solprovider]

If he really [actually] thinks that the downfall of Microsoft is an inevitability, I'd love to hear his timeframe on that.

Read my other posts. I believe MS will fall next year. I also believe Linux will play a very small part in that downfall. It will be the loss of revenue when OpenOffice becomes the standard for corporations that will put MS into the red.

Be thankful that Linux does exist. What would happen if MS disppeared and there was no OS usable and ready to become the standard? Yes, Linux will become #1 for the home consumer, but not because it beat MSWindows. It will be because MS's business model failed, and Linux was there to fill the void.