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Linus on SCO, and the Desktop Being 10 Years Away
An anonymous reader writes "In this interview from last week's Linux.conf.au in Australia, Linus Torvalds talks about how the SCO lawsuit 'riled' him and led him to spend a week writing an application to archive his email, and how he think Linux will take 5 to 10 years to become mainstream on the desktop."
Can someone clarify his view for me? I don't follow Linux very closely, but am genuinely curious what Linus' real thoughts on the future of Linux for the desktop are.
:)
He says in both articles that there have been a bunch of really good developments in making Linux user-friendly, but it'll be a while before Joe User feels comfortable sitting down in front of a Linux box. The earlier story but kind of a spin on it - it sounds like they took what Linus said a little bit too far. He didn't really say that 2004 would be the "year of Linux on the desktop"; he said that "This year there will be a lot of desktop users." That's it. Even if you did RTFA, it's still kinda confusing. That's the media for you.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
"Linus had once noted that he had never been in a dunk tank before, and noted that, without that experience, his life was not complete. He need wait no longer; at Linux.Conf.Au the lucky high bidder got to put Linus into the tank. Here's the photos:"
http://lwn.net/Articles/66665/
Well technically, no. He did write a new OS. He wrote it in Minix, and wrote it to be compatible with Minix. And he did write Linux because he saw that Minix was lacking in a few areas. But Linus did create everything from scratch.
If you haven't yet, read Just For Fun, it's a great semi-autobiography.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
It would be a help to actually read the damn article. What Linux actually talked about was "they've subpoenaed me for a lot of emails, and I spent literally a week writing a tool to index all my emails, so that when they give a better criteria for me, what they really want, I can actually produce it."
No mention of archive or an archive type app there....
I've noticed recently that the SCO lawsuit has made some waves in UK papers, where previously you'd be hard pushed to find a mention of Linux whenever a computer-related article is published (Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft!).
The BBC have picked up on the story now.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
Linus Torvalds Q&A
Kate Mackenzie
JANUARY 16, 2004
LINUX creator Linus Torvalds spoke to Australian IT during his visit to Adelaide this week for Linux.conf.au, his second after attending last year's conference in Perth.
So what made you come to Australia two years in a row?
It's summer here, and it's winter in California, but literally there are only two conferences I go to anymore, because I like the technical ones, and the Australian one, as far I can tell.. it's not organised in the commercial conference kind of sense, but that just means it's a lot more relaxed, the people just talk about tech they don't try to sell stuff, and these days in the US it's unheard of, you can't make money with this kind of conf, so I go to the Australiani one and I go to one in Canada (Ottowa Linux Symposium).
What do you get out of meeting up with people in real life that you don't get from communicating with them on the net?
I actually meet up with different people, mostly it's getting a sense for what people are saying and thinking.
And, I talk to developers here, but not so much - more of the time, I just talk to people who are writing code. The kind of people who come to conferences like this, they tend to be technical people, they tend to be somewhat involved with development, but they're not so much the people I work with all the time.
It means that it's fun. I'm making a bold prediction that we'll go out for beer every night - it's partly socialising, but also getting a better view of what people are thinking about, what people are worried about.
Has anything struck you so far?
So far no, there haven't been any huge issues which is always nice. But on the other hand, the huge issues - when people start fighting, screaming, that can be interesting - that's how you see where there's real problems - people standing on other side of the rooms and not being very polite... that hasn't happened yet, but the week is young.
Anything you're particuarly looking forward to? I'm mainly following the desktop stuff, so the GNOME meetings...
I remember you saying at last year's Linux.conf.au that you were quite focused on the desktop. How do you think it's gone in the past year?
What's kind of interesting is... literally in a year or so, it's been to concentrate almost entirely on server space and things like telephony, where you have big companies setting up rooms.
Within the last year, even six months, there are big copanies now interested in literally not just selling desktop Linux, but also using desktop Linux internally. I mean it's going to take, literally five to 10 years before "normal users" start seeing Linux desktop, but in the technical space it's doing pretty well, especially in companies that can support it already.
Okay, here's the difficult question. What do you think about this SCO business right now?
Right now I'm actually fairly calm, because they haven't made any huge outrageous claims in the past 12 days or so, so they've been quiet for a while. It hasn't been that bothersome, but every once in a while, when they make some new claim, it really riles me - I mean they've literally claimed copyright on files I can prove I wrote personally, and that's very irritating.
But at the same time, the fact that their claims, when you step back, are so clearly bogus and not worth worrying about, is - that makes me worry a lot less. They're clearly scraping the barrel and coming up empty handed.
So it's irritating but I can live with it. I'm just hoping it's going to finally come to a head soon, because it's just dragging on - it's been dragging on for something like eight months, and it's getting pretty tiresome.
It doesn't seem to be having much negative impact though on the use of Linux, that must be encouraging?
I don't see any customers anyway, but apparently... customers aren't reacting very much, especially not much anymore. But it has for example forced me to - they've subpoe
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.