Linus Interviewed

a9db0 writes "There is a somewhat low-content interview with Linus here in the Seattle Times about his move to Portland. It does have a couple of Linus classic one-liners."

Highlights

[shirai]

For those who don't want to RTFA, here are some highlights from Linus:

• Now, many of the volunteers end up getting paid, and maybe they can't be called "volunteers" any more if somebody ends up being silly enough to pay them for something they'd have done for free anyway.
  
  
• In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny. When you play with it, mommy isn't going to tell you what you can and can not do, and not going to take your toy away from you when she thinks you are done. You're an adult, and you can make your own choices. That is when you get engaged.
  
  
• I don't think the lawsuits have necessarily made a huge direct difference, but I do think that it has made a lot more people realize that maybe Microsoft wasn't the "American Dream" after all, but just another greedy company that might be better off with some competition.
  
  
• Q. How can Linux avoid the security problems that have affected Windows?
  
  A. Better design and actually caring about them. Having the guts to really fixing fundamental design mistakes, rather than trying to work around them.
  

More detail

[erick99]

Here is an article [nwsource.com] with more detail about Torvald's move to Portland.

Re:Proneenciation?

[bcrowell]

Yes, but but when I said it that way, people laughed at me. There's an audio clip floating around the net, with Linus saying, "This is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce it Leenooks" (rhyming with "books").

Re:Proneenciation?

[JambisJubilee]

From Linus himself: http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/ [sladen.org]

Re:Ob. comment

[MP3Chuck]

Is that somehow his fault? Hell, read his original announcement on Usenet. He started it as a hobby. Now it runs on practically any architecture I've ever heard of, and then some. There are millions of people around the world developing for it. And one of the biggest corporations in the world sees it as competition.

I'd say that's pretty amazing.

Re:Quote

[michaeldot]

Me too. There's a touch of Douglas Adams about it... "The spaceship fleet hung in the air in precisely the way a ton of bricks doesn't."

Re:he is actually Swedish...

[ayn0r]

Err, no, he isn't. Swedish is one of the two official languages in Finland. Saying Linus is from Sweden just because he happens to speak Swedish is like like saying all english speaking Americans are actually British.

Re:Sounds like a great guy!

[Bitsy Boffin]

I think the parent poster may have been refering to chaos theory. A butterfly, through a chain of events can cause a hurricane, without any form of intention.

Google Search [google.co.nz]

Linus was the butterfly, who through a chain of events caused the hurricane that is Linux, wihout ever intending for that to happen.

Re:But, how do you really feel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if Linus ever changes his mind about MS, Steve Ballmer said that they'd hire him [varbusiness.com].

The first $ contribution to Linux from Portland

[Baldrson]

Actually the first monetary contribution ever sent to Linus for Linux was from a guy who now lives near Portland [outlander.com] and /. carried an article he wrote recently: The Jobs Crunch [slashdot.org].

Re:Highlights

[misleb]

I wouldn't go as far as to say that it includes other people. Do you dream of what some guy across the city childern future is?

Yeah. Believe it or not, some people DO care about the welfare of others. I know I do. And no, that doesn't make me a communist.

To say that everyone should have a better future isn't the American Dream, its more, IMHO, of the Communist Dream.

The American Dream is that everyone should have the opportunity for a better life. The Communist Dream is for a classless society where people work in harmony.

-matthew

Re:Election 2004

[nofx_3]

Even better yet is some good old fashioned Gov. VS Gov. deathmatch wrestling in The Running Man (A terrifc movie for those who haven't seen it). There is actually a scene where Schwarzenegger (Gov CA) and Jesse Ventura (Gov MN) duke it out. They can also be seen together in Predator. These are some classic political moments.

-kaplanfx

Re:Ob. comment

[el-spectre]

Correction: He created an implementation of an existing standard, which already had several other implementations, and took it to a new architecture, improved it (with lots of others), expanding it's abilities and hardware support.

"merely" indeed, troll.

Re:Sounds like a great guy!

[willie150]

It really pisses me off every time I hear the 'butterfly effect' used like this.

The intended meaning is that if you had a complete model of the world and factored everything in, but forgot a single butterfly, your model would be so useless that you could fail to predict a tornado.

The butterfly didn't 'cause' the tornado, but leaving it out of the model made it useless.

Have a look at wikipedia for a better explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

So the butterfly effect isn't really valid here, because Linus is responsible for Linux directly.

Wow, good job for american propoganda machine

[iamacat]

Communism is simply when everyone has access to resources that most people need to be happy - food, cloth, medicine, a place to live and so on. Imagine people getting a middle class salary as "welfare" if they don't otherwise make it. Obviously, in this case people must have some motivation to work other than the threat of poverty - for example sense of achivement, desire to improve life of other people and so on. Or with enough automatic production, perhaps most people don't have to work and the few jobs needed are filled by those eager to use their talent.

This has never worked out and perhaps can not given the greedy and lazy human nature. Nevertheless, get your facts straight. Communism doesn't preclude variety of choices and you can make improvements or changes. You will just probably choose to give them away, because you don't need to make extra money in order to get what you want from life.

Re:Highlights

[rajmobile]

To say that everyone should have a better future isn't the American Dream, its more, IMHO, of the Communist Dream.

Ah, to be thirteen and have access to a computer...

Re:he is actually Swedish...

[DunbarTheInept]

There is an attitude in Europe that we Americans often don't grok - people's percieved nationality sticks with them long after they emigrate, and even extends to their offspring. Hence a person who grew up in Finland, is a native-born citizen of Finland, is still often called a Swede if his parents are Swedish, or his parents' parents were all Swedish, and so on. Although here in the US we often talk of being from a nationality of our ancestors, we don't really mean it in the same way.

Conan O'Brian might call himself "Irish" on TV, but he and his audience know that that's not really true in any signifigant way - in all ways that matter he's an American first. This is a bit different than the attitude in Europe.

Re:he is actually Swedish...

[ztane]

Well, Finland was part of Sweden until 1809... so Swedish was the official language back then. The upper class and most people along the west coast were Swedish speaking. And that's why nowadays, many of the towns along the west coast are bilingual. Ethnical differences do not exist, it's just that if there's no pressure to do otherwise, you'll probably teach your mother tongue to your children as well. And while 6% of the population speak swedish as their first language, it's being taught in schools as compulsory subject to the remaining 94% (of course those 6% have Finnish as a compulsory subject as well, but many of them speak good Finnish even before school), and the country is officially bilingual there's no reason to do otherwise.

Re:Some background

[resiak]

...but [Isaac Newton] is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants...

I always find it amusing when people use this particular Newton quote in this context. See, at the time that he said this, Robert Hooke (yes, as in the law) was alleging that Newton had stolen his work and ideas. Newton's response was the sentence above. Hooke was a very small man, you see...

(about halfway through the optics paragraph) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Highlights

[KarmaMB84]

I think it has more to do with the fact that we flex our oversized military and economic muscles whenever we please.