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Linus on Linux in 1994
Vrallis writes "Ten years ago this month, Linux Journal christened their maiden issue with an interview with Linus Torvalds. It is definitely worth the read, and worth some reflection on just how far Linux has come in the last decade."
Treasure? I doubt it. Linus is a great individual, and has my highest respect. But this is more than what HE accomplished. He has coordinated a great deal of it, but linux is no longer his. Linux is a community. Linus a world treasure? no. Linus is the the catalyst. The free software and open source movements were not his creation. Linus is the man that got things rolling faster. For that I thank him profusely.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
I think the discussion of Micro-kernel versus monolithic kernel is academic at this point. Monolithic kernels have been made more flexible through the use of loadable modules. Window has shown that no matter what kernel you start with, you can still produce an unstable, insecure, and all around broken OS. If you try hard enough.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
...then I'll take some heed as to your notion of "appropriate" or not with respect to comments.
Linus et. al. have created an operating system I have used for over a decade and made over a million dollars using. If they find a little harmless humor or expressive freedom in swearing on occasion in the comments of their code, more power to them.
Saying "this implimentation if f*cked and needs fixed" is (in context) informative even if it is vulgar, and, quite frankly, it is their code, not Disney's (or $CO's).
i know that when i do coding, i try to make sure that not only the code itself is of high quality, but also that the comments are informative and useful -- not vulgar.
i just think that it's a childish thing to do.
It is no more childish than chiding someone who has put countless hours of hard work in for your benefit because their linguistic aesthetic differs from yours.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Funny you should mention Bill Gates. 10 years ago today, Bill Gates was telling his company to get with the next big thing, which was obviously the multimedia PC equipped with a CD-ROM. He never realized that a network card would be a more useful thing.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I'm not flame bating here, but what does Gnome have to do with Linux aside from the fact that its one of many programs that can run on Linux? From the Gnome about page, it mentions Linux twice with "or UNIX" right beside it.
The same would go for KDE (I have KDE running on a few students' Sun workstations).
What I think is impressive is that Linux is supported by many big vendors now like HP, IBM, Dell, SUN (wtf?), etc. I'm impressed that there are many nongeek household items that come with Linux powering them like the Tivo, Linksys wireless routers, wall mounted digital picture frames, etc. I think its impressive that the thing that I played with in my dorm room and in the physics labs at school now is my career. I'm impressed with the number of archetectures that it runs on. Currently, its alpha arm arm26 cris h8300 i386 ia64 m68k m68knommu mips parisc ppc ppc64 s390 sh sparc sparc64 um v850 x86_64. I'm impressed that when I went to the SuperComputing 2003 conference that Linux was pretty much _the_ OS to run clusters. I really think that Linux is a Good Thing(tm). It just happened, it works, and its not going anywhere.
Do you think your average user cares about this? Chances are he's running a pirated copy of Windows already, so he could care less whether or not it's free, and certainly won't bother to make the gratis/libre or beer/speech distinction since he simply doesn't care. What matters is the software support, and whether or not he can quickly and easily perform all of the tasks he's used to on Windows. What also matters is the hardware support, and the guarantee that the TV tuner card he just bought for $20 after rebate at Best Buy works properly with his operating system.
Of course, the issue with a lot of Linux evangelists is that they fail to realize how Windows is good enough for most people, that people are extremely stubborn, and will only change when forced to. My aunt Kathy doesn't care that Linux is made by a team of volunteers all around the world, or that Gnome and KDE offer many superior features to Windows. She cares that she can hop onto overpriced and under-featured America Online garbage and check her email. This is true of the majority of computer users, not the minority of dumb ones.
You can preach about free software all you want, but in the end, does it get the job done? And is it enough of an improvement to get people to give up what they've been using for years and learn an entirely new system?
There is absolutely no doubt that the Linux community has come a tremendous distance even in the last year or so. But we need to fucking work and work and work at improving the quality of the software, and drivers, if it's going to gain any mass-market acceptance. We're not done yet.
Another argument is that the rumours (I didn't read the code myself) that flew around when the Windows code got out were that there was rampant profanity in it as well. This isn't to say that it's ok to do because Microsoft does it, just that it's probably nearly universal to swear in comments about broken hardware/software/whatever and the difficulties associated with working around it.
Honestly, I'd be worried about software that didn't have profanity in the comments. Mostly I'd assume the authors either trusted the documentation about everything (in which case it won't work) or just avoided completely doing the hard work (in which case it's a useless academic project) or perhaps just don't have a sense of humour (in which case I feel bad for them).
Oh, come on now. Andrew Tanenbaum is an absolute legend, he is a fantastic educator, and his books are absolutely brilliant. He had a point in that Linux was using an old architecture, and would have been better designed as a micro-kernel. But what makes Linux shine is not its architecture, but the fact that it is GPL'd, and the fact that it has been developed in a software Bazaar as opposed to a Cathedral. It's unfortunate that Tanenbaum is now remembered by the Linux crowd by this debate - Andrew's argument was correct, but unfortunately completely missed the point of Linux (a point which wasn't obvious at the time, not even to Linus himself).