Linus Torvalds Officially a Hero

CortoMaltese writes "The European edition of the Time magazine has selected Linus Torvalds as one of the heroes of the past 60 years. From the main article: 'In the 60 years that Time has been publishing an Atlantic edition, extraordinary people have emerged from the churn and turmoil, creativity and chaos of a period that witnessed the aftermath of world war, the toppling of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the vanquishing of apartheid in South Africa, the advance of women, the failure of old certainties and the rise of new fears. These people are our heroes, and in this special anniversary issue, we celebrate them and their many achievements.' The article on Linus is titled 'By giving away his software, the Finnish programmer earned a place in history.' Linus is cited in the 'Rebels & Leaders' category along with Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others."

Comments

Heroes

[Anonymous Coward]

If giving away Linux earned him a place as a hero, imagine what would happen if Bill released Windows for free!

Re:Heroes

[EllynGeek]

That would make him a terrorist, by magnifying the problem of windoze botnets, spams, phishes, malware of all kinds, fraud, and identity theft a hundred times worse. We wouldn't even be able to get on the Internet at all- all the world's bandwidth would be devoured by warring malware bots.

Re:Heroes

[Abreu]

Haha, this confirms that the difference between a Freedom Fighter and a Terrorist resides only on who gets to write the history books afterwards.

And

[Konster]

RMS screams out loud, "No, that is GNU/Hero, damn it!"

Re:And

[One Louder]

Yeah, I'd hate to be a chair in Richard Stallman's office right about now - assuming he actually uses a chair and doesn't just levitate.

What a crock of shit!

[RLiegh]

Sorry, but all that Linus did was to get help on his pet project. The real people who advanced freedom and the cause of free software were the folks over at the GNU project and (at the time) the CSRG. Usually I agree with the people who roll their eyes when Stallman goes on about GNU/blah but this time I can see his point... Linus winning this award actually helps to bury them, and worse yet it detracts from the ideals of the GNU movement (and remember, in 1992 if there had been no GNU, there would have been no Linux; period).

Sorry, as far as impact and influence goes -like him or loathe him- Stallman has had more of an active, positive influence on the open source movement; Linus is merely a clever student who managed to wring the most homework help out of the internet...Stallman started the movement which eventually led to Sun opening up their crown jewels.

Re:What a crock of shit!

[duh P3rf3ss3r]

No, I'm sorry but you are wrong. The GNU tools were useful and were used a great deal before the Linux kernel came along. Just look at how many of them shipped with the various flavours of BSD (several of which pre-date Linux, I might add.)

Yes, the Linux kernel filled a huge void on the road to a completely GPLed operating system. But it did not create the concept of a free OS nor did it create the concept of freedom. Those concepts pre-date Linux and were embodied in the GNU project.

I'm not trying to get into a RMS/Torvalds flamewar -- we've had too many of those. But I also don't accept revisionist history that says that GNU would be nothing without Linus's kernel. If you truly believe that, perhaps you can explain to me how the GPLed parts managed to exist for almost a decade before the kernel came along. Do you think that, once the kernel appeared, someone said "Oh, yeah, there was a bunch of mouldy stuff in the bottom of the drawer over there that was invented nearly a decade ago and we couldn't figure out what it was for -- let's try it here!"

RMS would a better choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, if you were to only pick one person from the whole Free/Open Software world, it would have to be Richard Stallman. I give him 'hero' status because he's the man who spelled out the four freedoms of software which are more important than the GPL(any version).

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
         
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
         
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
         
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  

Re:Reminds me of the movie "hero"

[eldacan]

The most common form of hero is the person that actually goes about to get the hard parts done
Like (co)developing a compiler (GCC), a debugger (GDB), a programer's editor (Emacs), which Stallman did. Not the most visible parts of a working system, but quite essential ones.