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Wired Interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Oct 15, 2003 01:46 PM
from the stuff-to-read dept.
Software Linux
Tones125 writes "Wired has a lengthy interview with Linus Torvalds contrasting the tedium of his humble life with his superhero cult status, and also briefly mentioning his take on the SCO mess, Richard Stallman and John "maddog" Hall. My favourite quote: "He jokingly refers to himself as Linux's hood ornament"."
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  • My favourite quote: "He jokingly refers to himself as Linux's hood ornament"."

    My favorite quote is another one:

    Torvalds, 33, looks like a supply clerk.

    Although I wonder, where did he get that impression. Looking at Linus' face I can say a normal human.

    • I found it rather more disturbing how the interviewer went into detail describing how he looks. Maybe it would be alright if he was interviewing some sexy female celeb, but interviewing a famous computer innovator?
      • Excuse me, but some of us female slashdotters like hearing about how Torvald looks. He's cuter than I imagined he would be.
            • Actors, Musicians, Politicians, and the like are just people. The only real difference is that they've done something or been somewhere at the right time to make news. I think that people who go out of their way to remain in the news even when they've done nothing to merit it are the most pathetic types out there. This is why Torvalds is cool. Because he doesn't come across as attempting to live to make headlines, actions of his that actually have ramifications make news.

              I'm sorry, but I refuse to recogni
    • Torvalds, 33, looks like a supply clerk.

      Yeah, that's a good one, but Linus needs round-rimmed glasses, a green army-issue cap, and a teddy bear if he really wants to look like a supply clerk.

    • I saw a CA license plate with "LINUX" on it a few months ago. It was on some kind of red sports car IIRC. Since "Linux" is trademarked by Linus, does that mean it was his car, or is the state of California in violation? Or can I get "COCA COLA" or "IBM" or "MICROSOFT"on my plates?
      • At least at the time his biography (which I won't recommend reading, the Linux kernel in a hex editor is more enlightening and entertaining literature) he drove a blue BMW Z3. And given that trademarks are only valid for a certain kind of possibly-competing products, I doubt that he could sue the owner, even if he would want to.
    • My favorite quote is another one:

      I liked his mother's line: "As Sara [his sister] and I used to say, just give Linus a spare closet with a good computer in it and feed him some dry pasta, and he'll be perfectly happy," Mikke wrote.

  • Funny... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NilObject (522433) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @01:49PM (#7222237) Homepage
    I used to jokingly call my (now ex) girlfriend a hood ornament.

  • True costs of Linux (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.

    I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to
    • That wasn't even a very good troll. Try harder next time. Linux has all of the features you say it lacks, and there is no 'shareware' version. But of course, you know this. I highly doubt that you are a consultant of any kind. 'Kernel level' programming in VB? Please..

      More likely you are just a wannabe slashtroll hiding in Mom's basement.

      I know..don't feed the trolls. This one as so bad though that I couldn't resist. A good troll should at least sound plausible!
    • Yes, my experience exactly! My VBScript kernel runs perfectly on a cluster of Windows 98 boxes, which are so stable that I'm using them as a support for the desk.

      Linux is obviously a sham, written by weekend hackers, and frankly I'm surprised that the Apache team dared to steal the Microsoft-developed HTTP protocol for their IIS-alike so-called "web server". ... HEY!

      IHTB!! [securityfocus.com]
    • Wow! This isn't a troll, its a +6 funny!

      Relax bro, SOMEONE got the joke!

    • I sincerely hope this is a joke. Windows doing "an amazing job"? VB as an "Enterprise" language? Riiiiggghhhtttt... Linux and Windows are fighting for small server space and/or clustered space. Businesses that need serious computing power are either using clusters (for midrange work) or serious machines such as Sun, HP, and IBM.

    • Re:True costs of Linux (Score:4, Informative)

      by stienman (51024) <adavis@nOSpAM.ubasics.com> on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:32PM (#7222657) Homepage Journal
      Ripped from here [securityfocus.com] and here [betanews.com] and some mandrake forums. Earliest post appears in February of this year, but it may be earlier.

      -Adam
    • Ok... I happen to work for a company with VERY close ies to Microsoft and am in an office across the street from the main campus in Redmond. They won't let me run Linux as a result of our relationship but I did get them to let me use Apache, MySQL and PHP. And not once have I ever had a problem... even on a Windows machine and even having to compile my own code at times.

      And why would that be? Because I don't base the vast majority of my knowledge on a language like Visual Basic which was based upon a langu
    • You must be a hungry troll, and new to Slashdot at that.

      First of all, many people around here don't consider VB a real programming language. And you claim you don't like C, but you need to realize that there is A LOT of code out there written in C.

      Linux doesn't support SMP or Journaling file systems? Where did you come from? And Apache is used on servers that serve lots of pages, wheras IIS is used by pages that get defaced.

      How did you "integrate" the servers into the server pool? Did you have both lin

  • Wired Implodes... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, great.

    With so many Slashdot users not reading the Wired article, now Wired will suffer a massive loss of advertising revenue due to so many people not accessing their site.
  • "He jokingly refers to himself as Linux's hood ornament".

    Wrong! That would be "GNU/Linux's hood ornament". And if truly follow Stallman, that would be the bug that hit the hood ornament because its all about him! HIM! HIM! HIM! Muhahahaha! Now where's my HURD so I might smote thy kernel.

    • Stallman declined to be interviewed ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by s20451 (410424) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:00PM (#7222362) Journal
      This is more true than you know. According to the article, Stallman declined to be interviewed for the article unless the article used "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" throughout. Which would have effectively made the article about him and not Linus.

      Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.

      • Re:Stallman declined to be interviewed ... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by sacrilicious (316896) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @04:01PM (#7223571) Homepage
        According to the article, Stallman declined to be interviewed for the article unless the article used "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" throughout. Which would have effectively made the article about him and not Linus.

        It would seem fairer to me to say that this would have made the article be about both Stalman's work and Torvalds' work.

        Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.

        Some people seem to perceive Stalman as resentful of Torvalds because Linux stole the spotlight and rendered GNU a distant also-ran. I don't share this perception. I believe that Stalman and Torvalds have very different agendas, which happen to overlap in Linux. Stalman is promoting the idea of Free (liberated) Software. Torvalds is trying to build an operating system.

        Put another way, Torvalds has no particular allegiance to free software. The fact that he has licensed Linux under the GPL is incidental not idealogical; it is a means to the end of improving quality and development speed. If there was a non-free way to improve Linux on an ongoing basis, Linus might well adopt it. Stalman never would.

        I think it's interesting to compare what our world might look like if either Stalman or Torvalds had never existed. Perhaps if Stalman hadn't come along we'd have Linux but no GNU and no free software ideology (fathoming how a non-free linux could have gathered mass support is left as an exercise to someone other than me). Whereas perhaps if Torvalds hadn't come along, we'd have GNU plus free software ideology but nobody who was as gifted at managing the complex process of kernel development. If it had to come down to one or the other, I'd actually take the world without Torvalds. Even though my definition of "visionary" fits Stalman much better than it fits Torvalds, my reasons for prefering the Stalman world are practical: I believe that the process established by Stalman would have soon enough given rise to someone like Torvalds who could have done approximately as well. People with Torvalds' skill are by no means common, but open source has a very strong natural tendency to distill the uncommon from the common.

        People like Stalman who have the vision of a radically different system of values, who proceed from conceiving of the vision to implementing its foundation, who are courageous enough to unequivocally say publicly where they are trying to go... and to actually have those values make a radical and lasting difference for the better after only twenty years... that's my idea of a hero.

        • Linux is the operating system. An OS is a bit of code responsible for the allocation of resources: CPU, RAM, disk, hardware.

          The GNU tools are even the only thing in the basic operating environment, although they are a large part of what makes it so grand. The GNU project should get credit for its great work, but so too should XFree86, Postgresql, KDE (I dislike it myself, but...), nethack and so on.

          Probably the best credit that can be given is to call what Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake and friends d

    • Re:Stallman would not like this quote... (Score:4, Funny)

      by smartin (942) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:03PM (#7222394)
      Shouldn't it be SCO/GNU/Linux?

  • Linus' take on issues (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mhesseltine (541806) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @01:53PM (#7222289) Homepage Journal

    Is it just me, or is Linus' attitude towards Linux, Microsoft, etc. one of nonchalance? It just doesn't seem that he cares one way or another as to what happens. Is this the mark of a man of utter confidence? Or, is this someone who is just relaxed to the point of almost being stoned?

    Having never met him personally, I'm curious as to what people who have interacted with him in person make of his personality.

  • What the heck has be been smoking?

  • He confesses to being terribly disorganized. His approach to voicemail is to let messages stack up and then delete them without listening to any.
    I called 15 times about a bug in line 31337 in the latest release and never got a response. Why am I paying all this money for .... never mind.

  • Horrid misrepresentaion of history (Score:3, Informative)

    by odie_q (130040) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:13PM (#7222484)
    Quite sad really, the way he dismisses Richard Stallman and the GNU project as a failed project predating Linux and now trying to cash in on Linux' good name by renaming it GNU/Linux.

    Stallman refused to appear in the article unless the reporter got his terminology straight, which is reported as "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux, because early contributors adapted GNU components for Linux - never mind that the Linux core is non-GNU and now approaches 6 million lines of code."

    He further reports that "He obstinately rejects the term open source despite its now near universal use, preferring free software, the name he coined."

    If the reporter had checked his facts just a little bit, he would have realised that GNU/Linux refers to GNU systems using the Linux kernel. Further, he would learn and that open source was coined to renounce some of the ideas behind free software. The names can never be interchangable.

    The article also clearly states that while Linus started hacking on a kernel, he later wrote an entire operating system. It is quite clear that the writer actually believes this, despite being told otherwise by the actual original creator of the operating system most oftenly used with Linux. Why he chose not to check this claim baffles me.

    As someone who believes that a correct retelling of history is crucial to progress, I am appalled at this blatant disregard of the truth.

    • Re:Horrid misrepresentaion of history (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bob Uhl (30977) <ruhl@NOspaM.4dv.net> on Wednesday October 15 2003, @03:11PM (#7223123) Homepage
      Red Hat do not distribute a GNU system. Debian do not distribute a GNU system. SuSE do not distribute a GNU system. AFAICT, no-one distributes a GNU system. Not even Debian HURD.

      What all the above distribute (save Debian HURD, of course) is the Linux operating system, with an operating environment consisting of an awful lot of tools, including the GNU environment. But there's a lot additional: KDE; XFree86; Apache; Postgresql; Mozilla and more. I will grant that the base operating evironment is mostly GNU: bash, GNU ls, GNU tar, GNU this & GNU that.

      An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. Linux is an operating system; GNU HURD is an operating system; the Darwin kernel is an operating system; the Windows kernel is an operating system. Red Hat Linux is not an operating system; Debian/HURD is not an operating system; Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system; Windows is not an operating system. What they all are is distributions of OSes and certain apps, particular to each, which sit atop the OS.

      I'll admit, though, that I understand the FSF's frustration. It is highly annoying when people speak of Linux and really mean the wonderful GNU toolset. It's rather infuriating, and it's unfair to the GNU Project that it not get credit for all its work. But it would be just as unfair to all the other developers and projects who have contributed to making the average Linux distro so cool to simply call a distro GNU/Linux.

      • An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. [...] the Darwin kernel is an operating system; [...] Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system;

        Words are defined by usage. An operating system is obviously more then a bit of code which manages resources, because the front page of the Debian website says "Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer", and because page 1 of "Getting Started Microsoft Windows 98" says "Welcome to the Microsoft Windows 98 operating
  • Is it a lack of more people with the Linus attitude?
  • Folks, sit back, relax, and just do what you do for the joy of doing it.

    Linus, you are my freaking hero.

    • Folks, sit back, relax, and just do what you do for the joy of doing it.
      Good rule to live by. And it's pretty much what I took away from the article, too. :-)

      Linus is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, I'm sure & he got there by, well, just being Linus. That's a reassuring message in these troubled days. Linus impresses me as the kind of guy who, were the bottom to fall out tomorrow, would just look for another engineering job.

      • If you do something, ANYTHING well enough someone will be more than happy to pay you to do it. Look at a typical street begger. He might collect a few quarters just sitting there. Now, put a musical instrument in his hands. Maybe a dollar bill or two.

        I put this question to you: have you ever seen a musician who was any good on the street? I've seen a few. Very few, and mostly in Europe or high-traffic areas of New York. Instead of a cup, they had a music case open. Usually it's got quite a bit of currency

  • Somebody wired him to a lie detector and made him a lot of embarassing questions.
  • The fact that Linus seems to lead an `every-day' sort of "boring" life (his word, not mine) just makes him that much more likeable, imho.

    We couldn't have asked for a better hero.

  • GNU ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Captain Rotundo (165816) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:36PM (#7222701) Homepage
    "And although Torvalds released the kernel of his operating system well before GNU produced a reliable one of its own, Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux, because early contributors adapted GNU components for Linux"

    I couldn't image a more incorrect way to describe the GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate. could someone due a little research when writing an article? All the author would ahve to do is read ONE webpage on www.fsf.org to see how biased and wrong this is.

    I doubt Linus would agree with that statement. Unles the FSF has recently changed its stance I don't believe they have ever under any circumstances asked that a piece of software written by, or overseen by Linus be called "GNU/Linux".

  • My letter to the author (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cyberlemoor (624985) on Wednesday October 15 2003, @02:55PM (#7222935)
    Although your article about Linus Torvalds did a nice job of giving readers a good idea of the kind of person he is, I wonder why you felt it necessary to devote a paragraph to bashing Richard Stallman, with the only connection to Mr. Torvalds being his non-response to questions regarding Mr. Stallman. Moreover, I was disappointed by the fairly gross inaccuracies in your bashing. As you acknowledge, Richard Stallman is a forefather of the Free Software movement. He leads a philosophical school of thought that many consider to be fanatical, and he is not shy about defending his principles. This you also acknowledge.

    What you completely misrepresent, however, is his contribution to the operating system you refer to as "Linux." He, and others working with him (not Mr. Torvalds) developed many essential components still used in most of the free Unix-like operating systems used today, including all variants based on Linux. These components include compilers and assemblers (essential for application development), text editors, various essential utilities, and many, many more applications. These people have, however, failed so far in producing the most essential piece in a working Unix subsitute: a viable replacement for the Unix kernel. This is what Mr. Torvalds did, and that is what Linux is: a kernel.

    Thus, the 6 million lines of code in the Linux kernel form only a small part of a complete Linux-based operating system. There are many other components, and a large number of them are GNU software without which the operating system would be useless. For this Mr. Stallman would like you to call the complete operating system a GNU/Linux system. Frankly, I don't think this is too much to ask. Also, please note that no one demands that you call "Torvalds' work" GNU/Linux. They simply ask that you not use the umbrella term "Linux" to refer to everything working with the Linux kernel (the only part which is Mr. Torvald's work).

    You write, "Torvalds released the kernel of his operating system well before GNU produced a reliable one of its own," as if there is some kind of competition which GNU software writers lost, and about which they are now whining. In reality, Mr. Torvalds did not write his own operating system; he wrote a kernel that worked with the operating system GNU was already developing, and today we use both together.

    Many disagree with Mr. Stallman's ideals, and find him to be a generally unlikable character, and you may be one of them. But to deny his significant contributions to Linux-based operating systems out of ignorance or spite is simply unacceptable journalism.
    • I think this whole GNU/Linux wording problem would simply go away if they just released their own distribution. THEN they can call it GNU Linux (no slash), and I'd probably buy it. (It would be a donation to a good cause.)

      I do not like the term GNU/Linux not out of disrespect - on the contrary, the FSF has given much to the world, and for that I am most appreciative. However, I use X, PostgreSQL, Apache, and a number of other tools that use different licenses, and I am NOT about to start call it GNU/MIT/Qt
    • (Stallman declined to be interviewed unless this article used his nomenclature throughout.) Imagine that.

      The article even refers to the kernel licence as "Linux GPL". Maybe it's correct in a technical because the kernel is licensed under the GPL with an additional permission grant (and some parts of the kernel do not include source code), but it's also unfair to neglect the GNU contribution so completely.
    • Linux is recognized as the leader of the project and nothing more. If you have ever looked in the source, it is littered with the names and email addresses of those who have contributed. There is even a CREDITS file in the root level of the source tree.

      Everyone who writes code for the kernel does so to improve the kernel, not satisfy their ego. The ego seekers quickly get bored or disgusted and move on. Slashdot should have a similar system if you ask me.

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