Linus Holds Forth On the Future of Linux

colinmc151 writes "As part of Geekcruises' Linux Lunacy cruise to Alaska, Linus Torvalds was interviewed and answered questions about where he sees the future of Linux with a particular eye towards developers. Great stuff."

Linus about Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

How come nobody ever asks Linus what he thinks about Mac OS X ?

One thing for certain

[El]

The open source developers will be amongst the last to see their (volunteer) jobs exported to India and China!

Linux on the desktop

[kevin_conaway]

He pretty much dodged that question. He made a vague reference to locking down pcs and how linux is much better at it ? Sorry but you can do that on windows as well.

Folks have said this before but it bears repeat, oss shouldnt be trying to clone windows, it should be trying to innovate something new...but hey what do i know

Re:Linus about Mac OS X?

[Trurl's Machine]

This question is sort-of-answered in "his" book "Just For Fun" (actually written together by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond). Linus seems to have almost religious anti-MacOS X stance. He is against anything that is proprietary - and MacOS X still remains proprietary on its most important layer. He is against the very idea of microkernel, so he is against Mach as such. It's funny, because this book is actually written on a Mac notebook, but as David Diamond notes, when Linus was reading his own words for approval, he payed more attention to the whole OS and the machine (and expressing his dislike for both) than to his own words. Probably that's how the silly mistake about "Apache, the most popular commercial Linux version" could have slipped.

Re:Linus about Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because OS X is a single-vendor, single-platform and mostly proprietary OS. It's just not that interesting.

Take away the gumdrop widgets and drop shadows, and you're left with nothing special.

Today is about commodity hardware, with freedom of choice, and commodity OSes with freedom of choice again. Being tied to one OS from one vendor on one plantform is too much like the early 90s... Like the Amiga. Good for its time, but it's a different world now.

Re:another interesting read...

[ignatus]

The main difference between Microsoft and Open Source is that Microsoft needs its customers to buy their products. That is in Open Source hardly the case. As long as open source can count on a reliable group of supporters, development will still go on. In that way, open source doesn't need marketing the way Microsoft does. Marketing can only help open source to gain popularity, but their is no real profit attached to it.

Millions of thieves can't be wrong...

[Chemisor]

For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that you shouldn't have to pay for things that you want. The fact that such people continue to exist, must necessarily constitute a historical proof that such beliefs are indeed worthy and rational. (Note that free as in "speech" is usually accompanied by free as in "beer", blurring the distinction by the simple observation that neither product makes any money for its developer. Look at RedHat, for example, which makes no money at all from its software, but nevertheless is able to keep itself from bankrupcy by holding hands of those few who are not able to install it themselves.)

Re:having a bias

[Telex4]

I couldn't agree more with you. There's a strange intellectual cowardlyness amongst a lot of geeks on this, which I think in part comes from their reluctance to step outside technical discussions. Making a confident statement on Free vs proprietary software requires a degree of philosophical and political confidence and knowldge that I think many don't feel they have.

You get to the point where everybody is saying that all opinions are valid, and nobody needs to have one, which is really daft. In fact, each side (Free vs proprietary) has various facts to support them, and either opinion is important in itself and its bases.

I wish Linus, and for that matter all other FOSS developers, would get off their bums and make an effort to be human. I'm sure we'd have far more success in the lobbying world if they didn't say things like "I'm not a lobbyist".

Re:another interesting read...

[cpeterso]

Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a great book. It is very similar to Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" [dreamsongs.com]. This theory also explains why inferior products like DOS, Windows, C++, and Java succeeded. They sucked in many ways, but they were better in some small, important way.

Re:Linux on the desktop

[broeman]

I never got the feeling that the linux kernel is like the windows kernel32 ... I think he likes KDE because it is trying to move things (like windows is trying to), instead of GNOME, who wants to be perfect and clean (like Apple). Cloning windows/apple is only done because they in a hurry (if you call 5 years fast) wanted to create a usable desktop. Now that OSS is at the point of looking like Windows/Apple, the development can go even further and maybe in new innovative directions.

Re:Desktop

[unborn]

The problem with lack of domination of at least a standard underlying software architecture is that we may get this great software X for the Mac, this great software Y for Linux and this great software Z for Windows. Not a lot of people can afford to have three machines on their desk, at least for now.

Competition is good only if there is some commonality, at least in the sense that a piece of software can run on multiple platforms. But this can't be technically viable for software companies if there are so much differences.

Take an example of this problem: software that only works on OSX but not on Windows (or Linux). Obviously it turned out that a lot of people wanted iTunes on Windows, but it took Apple to take the step forward.

I personally think that competing Linux/FreeBSD distributions are better than Windows Vs. Linux Vs. Macintosh. And that is similar to the Intel Vs. AMD in the hardware arena.

Openoffice and QT

[vivek7006]

I think the biggest single thing that has happened on the (garbled) have been a lot of good library frameworks. Qt in particular I think made a huge difference.

OpenOffice is still, in my opinion, a complete disaster. And part of the reason is that it's not using any of these frameworks that were signed for different applications. It built its own framework. I am told people are trying to fix it.

Qt guys should focus on porting openoffice using the QT framework. Openoffice is great, but a QT port would be totally awesome. Even linus thiks so

OpenOffice a Disaster.

[Safiire Arrowny]

Woah, can you imagine how the OpenOffice developers must feel after reading that?


If I was working on some huge Linux project and Linus said it was a disaster, I'd feel pretty bad. I probably wouldn't stop building it or anything, but it'd be a downer.

Re:Linus about Mac OS X?

[daviddennis]

Sadly, I think the links to your examples don't work. I finally discovered you can't get away with more informal HTML styles in Slashdot - you have to use quotes. So:

<a href = http://www.amazing.com>

won't work, but

<a href = "http://www.amazing.com">

does.

Some years back, when I used Linux on the desktop, I tried a few Enlightenment themes. For whatever reason, I found them quite difficult to set up, and far more attractive in screenshots than actual day by day use.

I'm older than I used to be, and a lot busier, and that means I don't have the many hours it takes to fine-tune things like this. So I choose MacOS X, which has done a beautiful job on my behalf.

So if you're young and poor, or just plain poor, use Linux and spend your free time making it look nice. But if you're old and rich, or just plain rich, get MacOS X and enjoy it as it is.

D

Re:Desktop

[Feztaa]

We need easier setup and a useable interface.

Linux is already easier to install than Windows, the problem is that people haven't heard about Linux, and even when they do, they won't switch because they want their games.

What linux really needs in order to make inroads on the desktop is to be preinstalled. And to have more games ship with Linux support right out of the box.

Re:Linux on the desktop

[mabinogi]

> Not to mention that the permission system in Windows is much more finely grained than it is in Unix. If you want to allow someone to write to the font directory, you can do it without granting SuperUser access.

you can do that in a Unix system too..just create a group called "fonts" and make the directory group owned by it, and those users that you want to allow to write to it members of that group.

it's far too easy to get a complete mess with windows ACLS....and it's much harder to understand the whole picture, and fix a problem when it exists.

About the only improvements I would want for the unix permission system, is maybe groups of groups, and outside the filesystem space, a few arbitary root only things made configurable (like listening on a port below 1000)