CNN Sits Down With Linus Torvalds

just_another_sean writes "Calling him 'reclusive' and the 'leader of the Open Source Revolution' CNN has an interview with Linus Torvalds. From the article: "I actually only work with a few handfuls so I tend to directly interact with maybe 10 - 20 people and they in turn interact with other people. So depending on how you count, if you count just the core people, 20 -50 people. If you count everybody who's involved; five thousand people -- and you can really put the number anywhere in between... Almost, pretty much all, real work is done over e-mail so it doesn't matter where people are."

Comments

Did he just compare Microsoft to witchcraft?

[RocketRay]

Sounds like it to me:

To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.

Zing!

a Stallman quote on Linus' leadership

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Talking about a t-shirt which showed Linus as a sword-wielding leader:

"It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. What good is it?"

From Chapter 13 of the biography of Stallman.

Re:Leader?

[hackstraw]

I wouldn't call him OSS leader :)

I would. I mean its pretty much between RMS and Linus, and I would give it to Linus.

Sure GNU did come first and Linux would be impotent without it, but Linus has something Stallman does not. Brand name recognition and a damn good OS that powers a bunch of the internet, routers, printers, digital picture frames, you name it.

Also, Linus is more suit and general public friendly than RMS will ever be.

If its not Linus or Stallman, who is the OSS leader or is there no leader but rather just a bizarre style of underground thing?

Are you trying to be funny?

[mangu]

Apple seems to be slowly and surely becoming the home base for open source and cutting edge development and is moving out to dominate the "gadgets" market.

If by "dominate the gadgets market" you mean selling lots of iPods, maybe you are right. But "home base for open source"? The Apple operating system isn't open source, for chrissake! There's no intersection between Linux and Apple, Linux is an open source operating system, Apple is a system which has some open source elements, but the OS isn't one of them. It used to be but, thanks to the BSD license, that detail has been fixed.

As for this "cutting edge development", could you be so kind and point us to any big OSS project whose development began in Apple and was later adopted by others? I mean, like Konqueror was the basis for Safari, only the other way round?

Oh, sorry, I forgot, don't feed the trolls, or maybe that big "whooosh" was the joke going over my head?

I used GNU before Linux existed

[mangu]

There was a shop in Venice, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which sold open source software in the late 1980s. You picked your choice of OSS and sat in the waiting room while they prepared your 360kb 5.25" diskettes. I went there a few times, but it was like buying some herbal tea from a chinese shop.

If you ask me, the biggest contribution of Linux was turning the OSS movement from a "niche" to a "community". Linux got a recognition from the mainstream software world that GNU never came even close to obtaining.

Re:It's good to see that he didn't bite

[aetherspoon]

No such equivilence in the US.
Just watch how they react to news stories on the air - you'll see it after awhile as long as you pay attention. Just like MSNBC and Fox News (although to different points of view).

Major television news outlets in the US are worthless, and this comes from a US citizen.