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Wired Interview with Linus Torvalds
Tones125 writes "Wired has a lengthy interview with Linus Torvalds contrasting the tedium of his humble life with his superhero cult status, and also briefly mentioning his take on the SCO mess, Richard Stallman and John "maddog" Hall. My favourite quote: "He jokingly refers to himself as Linux's hood ornament"."
Linus tied to the hood of his pickup like a slaughtered deer. Oh, that and 5 wives.
I used to jokingly call my (now ex) girlfriend a hood ornament.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the nstallation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Oh, great.
With so many Slashdot users not reading the Wired article, now Wired will suffer a massive loss of advertising revenue due to so many people not accessing their site.
Excuse me, but some of us female slashdotters like hearing about how Torvald looks. He's cuter than I imagined he would be.
Can I bum a sig?
Shouldn't it be SCO/GNU/Linux?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Duh!
Real programmer's marry kung fu.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
No problem with that. The "GNU/Linux hood ornament" would simply have both RMS and Linus in it. Simple!
Oh wait.
I'm suddendly getting a mental image of a hood ornament consisting mostly of a giant beard flapping in the wind, with two dim and indistinguishable faces somewhere inside it, one with blue eyes. Need to reconsider this....
Um, can we have a GNU/SCO hood ornament instead? Richard and Darl up there side by side -- I'd probably never need to honk again!
Actors, Musicians, Politicians, and the like are just people. The only real difference is that they've done something or been somewhere at the right time to make news. I think that people who go out of their way to remain in the news even when they've done nothing to merit it are the most pathetic types out there. This is why Torvalds is cool. Because he doesn't come across as attempting to live to make headlines, actions of his that actually have ramifications make news.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to recognize that politicians are just people. They are reptiles in humanoid form, perhaps.
This isn't meant to be taken seriously, of course, politicians are just not deserving of much respect in my book.
Peace and love, y'all