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Linus Torvalds' Benevolent Dictatorship
treebeard77 writes "BusinessWeek has posted Linus Torvalds interview '
The creator of Linux says "I can't be nasty" when leading the open-source movement since it's all built on trust and teamwork' "
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...not a 'movement'. He wisely left that nonsense to the zealots.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Theo isn't the most polite, but he certainly gets things done in an organized safe and secure manner
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I think that not thinking about these things will eventually hinder Linux adoption, as it did in Munich's case.
So what's the long term plan? What kind of ideas are out there? I know there's a solution to be found!
Wouldn't the world be great if we could have political leaders that were more like Linus. The problem is people like Linus don't win elections because they're not manipulative liars like all the rest of politics.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
But MANY commercial programs aren't innovative, either. Microsoft Money is just a poor clone of Quicken, Norton AV does the same thing as McAfee, EZ CD Creator is a clone of Toast, etc. I don't think it's fair to compare the best, most innovative commercial software, with all of the thousands of mediocre open-source programs out there. Some of the best open-source programs are incredibly innovative: BitTorrent, Python, Subversion - and others, while they superficially act similar to popular commercial programs, have dozens of innovative features: Gimp, OpenOffice, Audacity
Linux was meant to be a Unix-like operating system for PCs. It presents a Unix-like interface because that makes it possible to easily port zillions of programs written for Unix operating systems. Internally, Linux was designed from scratch, and though it uses the basic Unix model (for processes vs threads, file-based devices, etc.), it has very little in common with any other Unix in the way it actually does anything nontrivial. Want to talk about innovation? Linux scales down to little handheld devices with 8 MB of RAM, and all the way up to 1024-CPU supercomputers. All with the same kernel (and different compile-time options). No other operating system can claim to do that. Is that not innovation? (Windows CE is NOT the same kernel as Windows XP, and no version of Windows scales up to supercomputers nearly as well as Linux.)
Apart from the points raised by other people on this thread (especially the one about EULAs being disclaimers claiming no warranty), I think what Linus was talking about was innovations from a technological point of view in the kernel, which I think is a valid point. MS comes out with Brand New NTFS(tm) and Brand New ActiveThis(tm) and ActiveThat(tm) every couple of years, as the reasons why you should upgrade to the latest Windows. Linux doesn't - it doesn't even encourage you to upgrade. The point is, rather than putting in *altogether* new features, Linus tries to maintain existing features (the standard Posix stuff) as efficiently and fast as possible. As Linus claims in his article, programs written in 1992 can still be run on the latest kernel. The whole point is that innovation with the kernel is happening behind the scenes, not in the marketing world where MS and other large software companies work.
My two cents on application usage: I think most developers are scared, because they know that if they get One Humongously Big Idea, large software companies will immediately embrace and extend them out of existance. They literally have no-one to hide behind under the open source model.
Well, naturally I haven't read the article, but the title says "dictatorship". In OSS, anyone can fork the project at any time. The fact that people have stayed with Linus's fork means it's more like democratic election.
"Software patents concern me. I worry about some greedy companies -- possibly failing ones, trying to make trouble and abusing the system. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
We have random people in random countries working on random things, and they don't have 1,000 patent lawyers. So I'm not worried about one patent in particular, but the whole system. It's not a problem today. But it's a thing I can't control, unlike the technical side, where I can actually do something."
It is refreshing to hear Linus state what RMS has been saying for the past five years. Software patents are evil, evil, evil. Yet Linus seems to stir less controversy when he says these things. I think both of them have a great deal of admiration for each other and both of them do very important if parallel work.
For all the talk about the Hurd, RMS doesn't use the Hurd.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software