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Linus Holds Forth On the Future of Linux
colinmc151 writes "As part of Geekcruises' Linux Lunacy cruise to Alaska, Linus Torvalds was interviewed and answered questions about where he sees the future of Linux with a particular eye towards developers. Great stuff."
How come nobody ever asks Linus what he thinks about Mac OS X ?
The open source developers will be amongst the last to see their (volunteer) jobs exported to India and China!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
He pretty much dodged that question. He made a vague reference to locking down pcs and how linux is much better at it ? Sorry but you can do that on windows as well.
Folks have said this before but it bears repeat, oss shouldnt be trying to clone windows, it should be trying to innovate something new...but hey what do i know
The main difference between Microsoft and Open Source is that Microsoft needs its customers to buy their products. That is in Open Source hardly the case. As long as open source can count on a reliable group of supporters, development will still go on. In that way, open source doesn't need marketing the way Microsoft does. Marketing can only help open source to gain popularity, but their is no real profit attached to it.
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that you shouldn't have to pay for things that you want. The fact that such people continue to exist, must necessarily constitute a historical proof that such beliefs are indeed worthy and rational. (Note that free as in "speech" is usually accompanied by free as in "beer", blurring the distinction by the simple observation that neither product makes any money for its developer. Look at RedHat, for example, which makes no money at all from its software, but nevertheless is able to keep itself from bankrupcy by holding hands of those few who are not able to install it themselves.)
I couldn't agree more with you. There's a strange intellectual cowardlyness amongst a lot of geeks on this, which I think in part comes from their reluctance to step outside technical discussions. Making a confident statement on Free vs proprietary software requires a degree of philosophical and political confidence and knowldge that I think many don't feel they have.
You get to the point where everybody is saying that all opinions are valid, and nobody needs to have one, which is really daft. In fact, each side (Free vs proprietary) has various facts to support them, and either opinion is important in itself and its bases.
I wish Linus, and for that matter all other FOSS developers, would get off their bums and make an effort to be human. I'm sure we'd have far more success in the lobbying world if they didn't say things like "I'm not a lobbyist".
Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a great book. It is very similar to Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better". This theory also explains why inferior products like DOS, Windows, C++, and Java succeeded. They sucked in many ways, but they were better in some small, important way.
cpeterso
The problem with lack of domination of at least a standard underlying software architecture is that we may get this great software X for the Mac, this great software Y for Linux and this great software Z for Windows. Not a lot of people can afford to have three machines on their desk, at least for now.
Competition is good only if there is some commonality, at least in the sense that a piece of software can run on multiple platforms. But this can't be technically viable for software companies if there are so much differences.
Take an example of this problem: software that only works on OSX but not on Windows (or Linux). Obviously it turned out that a lot of people wanted iTunes on Windows, but it took Apple to take the step forward.
I personally think that competing Linux/FreeBSD distributions are better than Windows Vs. Linux Vs. Macintosh. And that is similar to the Intel Vs. AMD in the hardware arena.
I think the biggest single thing that has happened on the (garbled) have been a lot of good library frameworks. Qt in particular I think made a huge difference.
OpenOffice is still, in my opinion, a complete disaster. And part of the reason is that it's not using any of these frameworks that were signed for different applications. It built its own framework. I am told people are trying to fix it.
Qt guys should focus on porting openoffice using the QT framework. Openoffice is great, but a QT port would be totally awesome. Even linus thiks so
Woah, can you imagine how the OpenOffice developers must feel after reading that?
If I was working on some huge Linux project and Linus said it was a disaster, I'd feel pretty bad. I probably wouldn't stop building it or anything, but it'd be a downer.
We need easier setup and a useable interface.
Linux is already easier to install than Windows, the problem is that people haven't heard about Linux, and even when they do, they won't switch because they want their games.
What linux really needs in order to make inroads on the desktop is to be preinstalled. And to have more games ship with Linux support right out of the box.