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Linus Interviewed
a9db0 writes "There is a somewhat low-content interview with Linus here in the Seattle Times about his move to Portland. It does have a couple of Linus classic one-liners."
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I wonder how many votes Linus will get in this US presidential election...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I don't think the lawsuits have necessarily made a huge direct difference, but I do think that it has made a lot more people realize that maybe Microsoft wasn't the "American Dream" after all, but just another greedy company that might be better off with some competition. And that probably has opened a few doors.
I think Microsoft has a PR problem. Largely deservedly, I would say.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Once again, I would like to thank the article submitter (as well as the Slashdot editor) who posted this story for giving us NO background information on who this Linus guy is. Are we all expected to instantly recognize every Joe Schmoe that has an interview posted online?
Next time, a little background info would be helpful people!
A. Better design and actually caring about them. Having the guts to really fixing fundamental design mistakes, rather than trying to work around them.
Sunny
Be my Friend
It's only spelled "Linus."
It's pronounced "Luxury Yacht."
It's like that old series of Peanuts strips where everything Charlie Brown looks at, he sees a baseball. Anything Slashdot looks at this month, it sees the U.S. presidential election, and filters it through that context. A Linus Tourvalds article is about the presidential election. A Java vs C# article is like the presidential election. AN ARTICLE ABOUT A GOOGLE SHAREWARE APP BECOMES ABOUT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
P.S.: And in answer to your question, the last gallup poll showed Linus leading Nader by two points despite the fact that 99% of poll respondents had never heard Tourvalds' name before
Here is an article with more detail about Torvald's move to Portland.
http://www.busyweather.com/
May we all realize this much some day.
Is there any way an AC can mod Linus + gajillion Insightful for that quote? If so, allow me.
Every time I read one of Linus' interviews I come away with the same impression...Linus sound like a really great guy! He sounds down-to-earth and practical. He doesn't sound greedy, manipulative or controlling. He sounds friendly and seems to have a great sense of humor. Basically, Linus sounds like a reverse image of Microsoft. Go Linu[s|x]!!!
Under the slashdot story which points to a Linus Torvalds interview there is an advertisement for Windows 2003 server and it's telling me that it's 17% cheaper to run!
Get your Unix fortune now!
> Linus Torvalds (pronounced LEE-nus)
Hmm, does that mean Linux should be pronounced LEE-nux?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
But we got Jedi recognised as an official religion by writing it on the census paper.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2757067.stm
Maybe if you score out one of the existing candidates and write Linus on it instead...
Deleted
...whether or not he frequents Slashdot.
:-)
Seems important to me, anyway
you must be new here. Linus has done some amazing things
Really? From what I understand, he merely started a now ~15 y/o approximate clone of a pre-existing OS that is still not ready for widespread adoption on desktop systems (despite what many would have you believe).
And yes, I use Linux.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Some folks still think that *nix is inherently virus proof because anything a mere user runs couldn't touch the really important stuff in
Maybe Linus is saying that as viruses start attacking Linux, he's willing to radically rethink permissions. GRsecurity and SElinux point in that direction, but wouldn't work for a normal user. Could there be a future Linux kernel that prevents an image library exploit from modifying your
I (as a Portlander) for one welcome our new Finish overlord.
-jim
Definitely the best line:
and I don't know why, but it made me laugh.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Being from Finland, Linus would be very at home in Minnesota, the land and trees (yes.. wood, finland's major national resouce) are very much alike. There are a lot of fins here as well, many who still speak Finnish (although Linus is a sweed-fin)
Having visited Finland for a couple weeks in January, (including a trip up to lapland), their winters are somewhat more mild than Minnesota. The temperature in Pello was about 2C higher than MN at the time.. Pello is about 30km north of the arctic circle if I remember correctly. Minneapolis is about as far north as Paris is.
Isn't it obvious? He's gradually moving in so the secret anti-Microsoft secret commando mission can take place. Give it another couple months and Linus and his cronies will have infiltrated Microsoft.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Is that somehow his fault? Hell, read his original announcement on Usenet. He started it as a hobby. Now it runs on practically any architecture I've ever heard of, and then some. There are millions of people around the world developing for it. And one of the biggest corporations in the world sees it as competition.
I'd say that's pretty amazing.
Who doesn't like free music?
Being from SoCal; What is this "rain" that you speak of?
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Anti-GPL arguments tend to boil down to one issue--if the code were truly "free," then you ought to be able to do anything you want with it, including slipping the original authors a deuce and taking the code and making it proprietary.
The GPL isn't designed to protect the code, it's designed to protect the community that wrote the code.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
There are millions of people around the world developing for it.
I agree with your sentiment. I use linux daily (posting from konqi on gentoo). But I have a hard time believing there are at least two million folks world wide that are "developing" for linux. Maybe a few hundred thousand, but I can't fathom two million or more.
If you have a source to back up your claim, please post it. TIA.
BTW, I agree that it's amazing.
They don't need good PR, because they're focusing on other solutions instead.
Err, no, he isn't. Swedish is one of the two official languages in Finland. Saying Linus is from Sweden just because he happens to speak Swedish is like like saying all english speaking Americans are actually British.
source to backup claim?
#!/bin/sh
echo "there are indeed 2 million folks developing for linux"
there you go. i.. umm.. developed that source, so make it 2000001 folks.
Linus has moved to Portland, OR, which is a fine thing, and as others have noted, that puts him amusingly close to Redmond, WA.
I believe that this may provide a possible explanation for the recent eruption of a volcano (Mt. St. Helens) fairly close to the midpoint between Bill and Linus.
You're right. Let me write some basic info about Linus:
Linus Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) began the development of Linux, an operating system kernel, and today acts as the project coordinator. Inspired by the teaching system Minix (developed by Andrew Tanenbaum), he felt the need for a capable UNIX operating system that he could run on his home PC. Torvalds did the original development of the Linux kernel primarily in his own time and on his equipment. Torvalds was born in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, as the son of Nils and Anna Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s, his father a Communist who in the mid-1970s spent a year studying in Moscow. This caused embarrassment to Linus at the time since other children would tease him about his father's politics. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 6% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling. He attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a masters degree in computer science. Torvalds lived for many years in San Jose, California with his wife Tove (six-time Finnish national Karate champion), whom he first met in fall 1993, his cat Randi (short for Mithrandir, the Elvish name for Gandalf, a wizard in The Lord of the Rings), and his three daughters Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20, 2000). In June 2004, Linus purchased a home in Beaverton, Oregon and enrolled his children in school in that area. He worked for Transmeta Corporation from February 1997 until June 2003, and is now seconded to the Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Oregon based software consortium. Linus and his family recently moved to Portland, Oregon in an effort to be closer to his employer. His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of Linux. Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Linus and coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief. Linus Torvalds Unlike many open source "evangelists", Torvalds keeps a low profile and generally refuses to comment on competing software products, such as Microsoft's commercially dominant Windows operating system. He is neutral enough to even have been criticized by the GNU project, specifically for having worked on proprietary software with Transmeta and for his use and alleged advocacy of Bitkeeper. Nevertheless, Torvalds has occasionally reacted with strong statements to what has been widely perceived as anti-Linux (and anti open source) FUD from proprietary software vendors like Microsoft or SCO. For example, in one e-mail reaction to statements by Microsoft Senior-VP Craig Mundie, who criticized open source software for being non innovative and destructive to intellectual property, Torvalds wrote: "I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? He's not only famous for having set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants ... I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost
three hundred years, but despit
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The American dream might not explicitly be about people other than you and your children having a better future but it doesn't take much to see that to have a better future yourself, you have to make sure that everyone has the same chance as you. Otherwise, the dream would just lead to class war, and destruction of society and the environment... oh wait... Well, something to think about.
...Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.
I've heard that when celebrities mention they like things like Pepsi or Nike during TV interviews, they receive huge amounts of products from the manufacturers as a sort of thanks for the unsolicited and valuable publicity.
Gunning for a new toy Linus?
Actually the first monetary contribution ever sent to Linus for Linux was from a guy who now lives near Portland and /. carried an article he wrote recently: The Jobs Crunch.
Seastead this.
I found the [Microsoft] "Getthe facts" [marketing] campaign pretty amusing, myself. I think people can make up their own minds about the facts.
This is a mistake that the talented and intelligent often make. Many people cannot make up their own minds about the facts. It's a bell-curve distribution; at one end are the people who have the intelligence and character to weigh the facts and cut through the bullshit, at the other are the ones who believe the MacDonalds healthy fast-food ads.
Of course, I could be wrong. I frequently am.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
I can't remember exactly but some time between 95 and 97 I was installing Linux and I was a true newbie to *nix back then. I had some major prob with the install and I wrought Linus a rather scathing Email. A few weeks later I got the best bitch slap of my life.
/..
I wish I saved that Email is was so elegant and worded so perfectly that I became a Linux / Linus Zealot (it was not a nice responce from Linus).
This interview just reminds me that I need to be more Linus like in my day to day life (I'm a bit hot tempered) and really think when I talk, or act Email, or post to
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
Correction: He created an implementation of an existing standard, which already had several other implementations, and took it to a new architecture, improved it (with lots of others), expanding it's abilities and hardware support.
"merely" indeed, troll.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Anti-GPL arguments tend to boil down to one issue--if the code were truly "free," then you ought to be able to do anything you want with it, including slipping the original authors a deuce and taking the code and making it proprietary.
Nobody can make your code proprietary. You have a copy of it and the same rights you always had. What a person can do with BSD-licensed code is incorporate it into something with a more restrictive license. That doesn't hurt the original creators of the code. It just opens the code up to more uses. For the same reason that I don't consider unauthorized copying "theft" or "piracy", I don't consider reuse of code in propietary software "taking it and making it proprietary". The original owner is not deprived of their code.
Sick of gentoo zealots throwing plugs in completely unrelated topics? Me too!
Hey! There is an ebuild that will automate that sig for you! And it will run really fast since you set the compiler flags yourself!
Communism is simply when everyone has access to resources that most people need to be happy - food, cloth, medicine, a place to live and so on. Imagine people getting a middle class salary as "welfare" if they don't otherwise make it. Obviously, in this case people must have some motivation to work other than the threat of poverty - for example sense of achivement, desire to improve life of other people and so on. Or with enough automatic production, perhaps most people don't have to work and the few jobs needed are filled by those eager to use their talent.
This has never worked out and perhaps can not given the greedy and lazy human nature. Nevertheless, get your facts straight. Communism doesn't preclude variety of choices and you can make improvements or changes. You will just probably choose to give them away, because you don't need to make extra money in order to get what you want from life.
That's something I've thought as well.
:) Who would replace him? I can't seem to think of anyone that would fit all those roles nearly as well as he does.
I think it would certainly stagnate. Linus is, in quite a few ways, the largest driving force: philosophically, technically, organizationally, nice-person-figurehead....ly, etc.
I'd say that, by far, his strongest point is his ability to colaborate with thousands upon thousands of people, balance personalities and egos that are typically more excentric than your average geek (let alone average person), and still manage to piss off a minimal number of people, all while cultivating a thriving heirarchy of kernel development culture. It's utterly amazing, and blows my mind utterly and completely. Very few people on earth, if anyone else, could do such a thing and have a coherrent piece of software at the end of the day.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hey there!
If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, how did my otherwise computer illiterate ex-girlfriend start using it for web/email/AIM/wordproc? How do people who come over my house know how to use the 'weird' machine? How is it a more pleasant desktop experience than XP for most people who try it out on a managed (read: not the 'everything installed' default system)?
Linux is ABSOLUTELY ready for the desktop, but like any new OS, you need someone who knows what they're doing to show it (and tailor it) to each individual newbie. Average folks weren't BORN with the Windows way of doing things already in their heads. The lack of Linux on the desktop is the result of several factors:
1. Not large enough expert userbase to provide 'neighborhood support'.
2. No marketing to the home market.
3. Total disregard/denial of desktop viability by admins and managers afraid of an OS that isn't their current bread-and-butter.
4. People like you.
In any case, Linus is as responsible for Linux GUI usability as You or I, that being 'not at all'. You can't blame a kernel hacker for the faults of the designers of the windowing environment, toolkits, and desktops.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
There is an attitude in Europe that we Americans often don't grok - people's percieved nationality sticks with them long after they emigrate, and even extends to their offspring. Hence a person who grew up in Finland, is a native-born citizen of Finland, is still often called a Swede if his parents are Swedish, or his parents' parents were all Swedish, and so on. Although here in the US we often talk of being from a nationality of our ancestors, we don't really mean it in the same way.
Conan O'Brian might call himself "Irish" on TV, but he and his audience know that that's not really true in any signifigant way - in all ways that matter he's an American first. This is a bit different than the attitude in Europe.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Well, Finland was part of Sweden until 1809... so Swedish was the official language back then. The upper class and most people along the west coast were Swedish speaking. And that's why nowadays, many of the towns along the west coast are bilingual. Ethnical differences do not exist, it's just that if there's no pressure to do otherwise, you'll probably teach your mother tongue to your children as well. And while 6% of the population speak swedish as their first language, it's being taught in schools as compulsory subject to the remaining 94% (of course those 6% have Finnish as a compulsory subject as well, but many of them speak good Finnish even before school), and the country is officially bilingual there's no reason to do otherwise.
The success of Linux has a lot to do with Linus Torvalds absolute lack of pride, except when it came to the code in his kernel tree. No pride, except where others have - by thier own opinions and devices - granted him authority.
Linus has never attempted to exert authority over anything related to Linux except the code tree that he maintains. Dammit, he is even willing to listen to others when it comes to that.
IOW, he has lead by example, never by coersion or force. He has made tough choices (the VM wars is an example) and recanted when necessary. He has settled flame wars, turned his back on very powerful alies (namely, IB-fucking-M, in the aforementioned VM wars), and still had the humilty to change his mind - when presented compelling evidence why he should change his mind - and continue on like he was right all along to listen to others.
That suspiciously smakcs of democracy. That, IMVHO, is someone to look up to.
I pray that God continues to be with him.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Only on slashdot could QUOTING THE ARTICLE be deemed "offtopic."
Linux has been named after Linus Torvalds.
:)
Linus Torvalds has been named after Linus Carl Pauling.
Now, besides pronunciation issues (you should ask Pauling's family how they called their late wonderboy!), it's enlightening to observe:
Linus Carl Pauling (LCP) is the only man who won two Nobel prizes in two totally unrelated fields: chemistry (1954 - discoveries on chemical bond's nature) and peace (1962 - battle to ban nuclear experiments). He also won the Lenin prize and the Gandhi prize.
LCP died in San Francisco in 1994. The same year Linus released Linux 1.0.
LCP directed (since 1936) the "Gates and Crellin" labs, in Pasadena, CA. Not too distant from where Linus first went working in US (Transmeta). And the name of the labs... Ah, the irony.
LCP was born in... yep, you got that... Portland, OR, 1901. Where our kernel benevolent dictator lives right now.
Isn't Karma doing wonders?
Some folks still think that *nix is inherently virus proof because anything a mere user runs couldn't touch the really important stuff in /bin.
.bashrc?
.bashrc, even if it's completely compromised by a buffer overflow, you can do it now. It's been possible since at least 1978 (the date on my copy of the 6th edition manual, but IIRC 6th edition dates back to 1976): if you run the browser in a chrooted environment, then the only way it can modify your .bashrc is for the guy writing the exploit to also come up with a way to break out ofthe chrooted sandbox.
No, UNIX is inherently virus-resistent because it was developed in a multiuser environment where you did things like having professors keeping exam results on the same computers that students had accounts on. You had to, it was too expensive to have separate computers for every group that might have a reason to compromise another's security. At Berkeley, it was fairly common for people to set up trojan horses in their home directory to try and trap people who visited their accounts.
The result of this is that the default behaviour of the standard applications (like word processors, browsers, the file managers) when faced with an unknown object isn't to execute it and see what happens. The few exceptions are well publicised and used as object lessons as to why you shouldn't do things that way.
Windows, on the other hand, has this model of "security zones", and once an object (file, document, web page) gets to a place where it's seen as local... in the "trusted zone"... standard Microsoft applications like IE and Outlook happily let it do anything its little heart desires. In response, Microsoft has spent the past seven years (at least) repeatedly redrawing the boundaries of this "trusted zone" in an attempt to keep bad guys from sneaking something into it.
That's one of the fundamental design mistakes that Linus is talking about. There are others, like the lack of a formal system call mechanism, or the fact that implementing strong local security is so inconvenient that it's normal and accepted for most home users to work with the equivalent of local root privilege all the time (and, yes, that really does matter in UNIX... it's some of the other design flaws in Windows that make this one relatively unimportant).
There are pathways for viruses and other malware to attack UNIX systems, but these pathways are due to bugs: fixing a buffer overflow hole in an image viewer won't change the way legitimate applications work or force the user to change the way they use the computer. Redefining the "trusted zone" in Windows does, because too many applications (including standard utilities and aministration tools shipped with the OS) depend on them... so every "fix" has a ripple effect that requires applications to use different APIs or devise workarounds, and often those workarounds end up being useful to malware authors as well.
And on top of that:
Could there be a future Linux kernel that prevents an image library exploit from modifying your
If you want to run your browser in a sandbox that prevents it from modifying your
So... given the security available on a 6th edition UNIX system in 1978, there are tricks that can be pulled to do that, but he'd need to be root first, so he'd have to have a third exploit to become root... from a sandbox where there's no root-owned and root-setuid executables to use to boost his privileges. It's possible there's a kernel attack that can be used, but it's much harder to devise a kernel attack on UNIX because verything has to pass through the same system call interface... you don't have separate call gates for each privileged component... so there's one interface the OS designers can depend on the attacker having to go through.
It could be done, but even with the facilities available in UNIX almost 30 years ago it was much much harder than it is now.
Today,
From TFA: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus]..."
1) wow. I never would've guessed that's how you say 'Torvalds'. Those wacky Finns...
2) So that makes him "LI-nus LEE-nus"?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I tried to be more like Linus, but his wife kicked me out of Linus's house and said she'd call the cops if I came back. To hell with trying to be like Linus - I don't want to go to jail !!