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Linus on Subversion, GPL3, Microsoft and More
victor77 writes "Linus has repeatedly slammed Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Subversion community has responded...how valid is Linus's statement?" This and many other subjects are covered in this interview with Linus.
Do we need a front page story on every interview Torvalds does? Let's save that for times he says something we haven't heard before.
Yeah, Linux is right. Git is great and CVS and Subversion are crap. That's why everyone has migrated away from CVS and Subversion to Git, the fantastic new tool he wrote. Oh wait. They haven't? Wonder why.
Sunday, August 19, 2007: Did Microsoft's Men In Black ever met Linus Torvalds? But why is he so critical of GPLv3? Why does he slam Subversion? What would happen to the kernel development if he chooses to do something else more important? These are some of the questions Linux/open source community from around the globe wanted to ask Linus. And, here is Linus candid and blunt, and at times diplomatic. Check if the question you wanted to ask to the father of Linux is here and what does he have to say...
Q: What are the future enhancements/paths/plans for the Linux kernel? --Subramani R
Linus: I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.
So I really don't have any great vision for what the kernel will look like in five years -- just a very general plan to make sure that we keep our eye on the ball. In fact, when it comes to me personally, one of the things I worry about the most isn't even the technical issues, but making sure that the 'process' works, and that people can work well with each other.
Q: How do you see the relationship of Linux and Solaris evolving in the future? How will it benefit the users?
Linus: I don't actually see a whole lot of overlap, except that I think Solaris will start using more of the Linux user space tools (which I obviously don't personally have a lot to do with -- I really only do the kernel). The Linux desktop is just so much better than what traditional Solaris has, and I expect Solaris to move more and more towards a more Linux-like model there.
On the pure kernel side, the licensing differences mean that there's not much cooperation, but it will be very interesting to see if that will change. Sun has been making noises about licensing Solaris under the GPL (either v2 or v3), and if the licence differences go away, that could result in some interesting technology. But I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude to that.
Q: Now that the GPLv3 has been finalised and released, do you foresee any circumstance that would encourage you to begin moving the kernel to it? Or, from your perspective, is it so bad that you would never consider it? -- Peter Smith / Naveen Mudunuru.
Linus: I think it is much improved over the early drafts, and I don't think it's a horrible licence. I just don't think it's the same kind of 'great' licence that the GPLv2 is.
So in the absence of the GPLv2, I could see myself using the GPLv3. But since I have a better choice, why should I?
That said, I try to always be pragmatic, and the fact that I think the GPLv3 is not as good a licence as the GPLv2 is not a 'black and white' question. It's a balancing act. And if there are other advantages to the GPLv3, maybe those other advantages would be big enough to tilt the balance in favour of the GPLv3.
Quite frankly, I don't really see any, but if Solaris really is to be released under the GPLv3, maybe the advantage of avoiding unnecessary non-compatible licence issues could be enough of an advantage that it might be worth trying to re-license the Linux kernel under the GPLv3 too.
Don't get me wrong -- I think it's unlikely. But I do want to make it clear that I'm not a licence bigot, per se. I think the GPLv2 is clearly the better licence, but licences aren't everything.
After all, I use a lot of programs that are under other licences. I might not put a project I start myself under the BSD (or the X11-MIT) licence, but I think it's a great licence, and for other projects it may well be the right one.
Q: Currently are there any Indians who you'd like to highlight as key contributors to the Linux kernel? What do you think of penis?
Linus: I have to admit that I don't directly work with anybody that I actually realize as being from India. That said, I should clarify a bit:
The whole Linus/SVN thing is actually revealing. It helps explain why Linux continues to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop. When you want to go after a broad user base that already has quite useful options, you have to bend your technical dreams to external forces, rather than blindly (and falsely) believing that whatever your idea of technical superiority is will win in the marketplace.
Thus, most of the world will keep using Windows on the desktop and ignore what Linus says about that, and most of the version control world will keep using SVN and ignore what Linus says about that as well. Do you like apples? Well, SVN/CVS is getting most of the actual version control work in the world done -- so how do ya like them apples?
There's nothing more pathetic in the marketplace than someone kvetching that their product should be winning because it's "better". It hails back to a false sense of entitlement that many people seem to have inherited these days.
So tell me what you are talking about. What example of an advanced kernel would you give? VMS, Slowlaris, IBM's mainframe hypervisor stuff ... do tell. Let me guess ntoskernel .... wmHahaha.
So as I suspected ... you have no idea. Your English is pretty strange too.
Technical superiority did win in BSD's case. While Linux is doing a lot in the server arena, it has accomplished very little on the desktop, despite efforts like OpenLinux and United Linux to create a standard Linux. The kernel may not have forked like Open/Net/FreeBSD, but there's really no difference between forked kernels and forked distros when it comes to fracturing the market. There are really no commercial apps for Linux and there is no real market that will ever encourage their development.
That leaves Apple's Mac OS as the only viable desktop, and its based on BSD, not Linux. It does however share the same POSIX platform, meaning that there's really nothing of unique value in Linux that can't be ported to Mac OS X, while there is lots of value associated with Mac OS X that will never make it to Linux: commercial apps, consumer focus, real marketing, retail support and the like.
It's not that code associated with Linux isn't a great contribution to technology, it's that it simply won't matter on the desktop. Linux is just the new FreeDOS, and Mac OS X is source code compatible with Linux' software.
My original point was only that the world didn't need a new Unix kernel, and there's really nothing special about the Linux kernel.