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Happy Birthday, Linus
Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"
Maybe without Linux we would use Minix or Hurd today. While Linus caused an crystallization point for hundreds of developers he did not write the thing alone. these people were already there. More or less waiting for something like this to happen. Most of them were already part of the Minix mailing list. So most likely Linux was already waiting to happen then. From my own time as an undergraduate. all the good programmers wanted to write an OS. And when it Linux came into existence everyone said cool. I take it and I do something with it. The same happened later with the browser as well. And if X11 would have had a better programming interface there would have been more different browsers out there. Still. Thanks to Linus for starting it.
Some North Americans really do overestimate the penetration of their own popular culture. Globally, most people wouldn't think of anyone at all. On Slashdot - Mr. Torvalds.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Authority_on_Linux
"About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself.[13] Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.[18]"
Do you know how much output that is?! Also, consider for a minute, that Linux isn't like the lightbulb, invent once and the work is done. How far would linux have gone if work quit in 1991, 1995, 2000? It's a work-in-progress.
The world is littered with half-assed and half-finished projects, particularly software. It's far better that Linus brings and continues one project to excellence than do a dozen mediocre projects that quite never get there.
Maybe you should go out and invent something. If it had 1/100 of the impact Linux has, you'll the world for the better significantly.
I know people like to think that the GPL played a significant role in the success of Linux, but in the face of so many examples of successful non-GPL free software such as apache and postfix, perhaps that assertion should be accompanied by a reasoned argument. Since no single software license is clearly a common denominator for successful free software, I wouldn't assume that the GPL is the driving force behind the success of Linux unless somebody makes a convincing argument in support of that claim. As it is now, although the assertion is often repeated, it seems to be based on mere assumption.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Linus invented 'git' much more recently, in 2005. If you haven't reviewed it for source control, and compared it to Subversion at Subversion's expense, I urge you to do so. It is lighter weight, _far_ faster, allows remote development far more easily, and actually pays attention to security with its far better handling of SSH keys and its built-in GPG signatures for software tags.
I can also attest that you only give up on life at 40 if your first 40 years weren't worth living. And in that case, your age probably wasn't the problem.
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
To take another random example: Ruby on Rails. The license deliberately is not GPL, or even LGPL (which might have worked), but rather MIT. This means I could technically "take" it -- remember, it's not stealing, and it's not even copyright infringement here -- and build my own proprietary product.
It also means that unless I relish maintaining my own separate fork of Rails, I'll be sending patches upstream whenever I do something cool. Even monkeypatches are much easier to send in as formal patches than to maintain.
I used to think as you do, but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots who will actually refuse to contribute to a project because they don't like the license.
I can see people contributing to Linux instead of BSD if they prefer GPL, and if there are no other factors. But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
Yesterday, I sent a patch to a project hosted by Google. They wanted me to sign an agreement essentially giving them copyright and a patent grant (without removing those rights from me) -- and this isn't Google being evil, it's common for projects to request copyright for contributions. I wasn't exactly happy about it, but it again comes down to the same choice -- are the terms of that agreement so bad that I'm going to refuse to contribute at all, or worse, fork the entire project? Probably not, especially for the small patches I have in mind.
And by the way: If you believe in the GPL, and you pirate anything (movies, music, games...), you're a hypocrite. A term common among those who have a problem with current copyright law is, "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement," implying that it's not as bad. I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!