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Linus Torvalds Receives IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
mikejuk (1801200) writes "Linus Torvalds, the 'man who invented Linux' is the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award, '[f]or pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach.' According to Wikipedia, Torvalds had wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of 'free,' 'freak,' and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server it was first hosted for download, named Torvalds' directory linux. In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution — but as it dates from 2005 it is outside the remit of the IEEE Computer Pioneer award."
He is very deserving of the award. Well done.
"Git can be seen as his more important contribution"
Umm no. The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux? It changed the world! The same can't quite be said about Git (although great in its domain).
Git is a nice tool, but it's not even close to his work on Linux. Orders of magnitude less important. You'd be paying for commercial licenses of Solaris, GNU would have seen far less of an audience and not progressed nearly as fast as it has, and you'd be paying VMware license fees every time you started up an EC2 instance. If Git disappeared tomorrow, I'd switch to svn and probably grumble a couple more times than normal. If Linux disappeared tomorrow, I'd be bankrupt and broke.
The most innovative thing with Linux was not that it is a Unix look-a-like. It's that it's a _free software_ Unix look-a-like.
I'm not going to say the kids need to leave the lawn, but saying Git can be seen in any way as Torvalds' more important contribution is speaking from ignorance. The people who say there were other OSes that could've filled the same role, but then list off prices for each, are ignorant too.
Linux was free and freely available.
I went from installing it out of the back of a book and from some odd company named Yggdrasil's ftp server, to installing it for a multi-million dollar enterprise fail-over solution.
I went from twiddling values for "drums" to get my hard disks recognized, to it upgrading itself unattended on a phone in my pocket.
Git got to where it was because Torvalds mandated it for Linux contributions. Linux, and the rest of the world, would be fine if Git didn't exist. There were and are plenty of free revision control systems out there. No one can say the same for Linux.