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."

Comments

Re:How selfish of him

[LuxFX]

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.

Re:I agree

[mmurphy000]

The rest of the world doesn't like 1 mouse buttons, no task bar, mouse-required task switching,..

Ummm...get your facts straight. I'm right now typing on a Mac with a Logitech scroll mouse that I had been using on a Windows machine, and it has more than one button. The Mac OS X Launcher behaves differently than the task bar, but it has the same core functionality (itemize the running desktop applications and provide you alerts). I think I remember seeing somewhere that there's a hotkey to switch between apps, but I haven't used that in over a decade in any serious fashion on any OS, so I never took note.