Linus Shares the Millennium Technology Prize 111
udas writes "The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every two years for a technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize. This prize, which is determined by the Technology Academy of Finland, is one of the world's largest such prizes with candidates sought from across the world and from all fields of technology. The two innovators will share over a million Euros. The final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012."
Re:Tech Acadamy of FINLAND!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Get bent. Digging deep enough, and being enough of a smartass, nothing is actually innovative. Meanwhile, other people are writing world-class operating systems for the love of the game.
Re:Tech Acadamy of FINLAND!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Stallman deserves credit too, for the creation of the GPL and the GNU tools Linus used, but his ideology would have prevented the operating system's success and effected the ecosystem that grew around Linux.
You say one thing and its opposite in the same sentence. Linux could exist upon the principles and roots that were the vision of Stallman. You then want to speak about the attitude of Stallman, which some finds not to their taste, but this very attitude, and its concrete fruits in the continuing evolution of the GPL, has been a determining factor in the preservation and growth of this whole open source/free ecosystem.
I find it short-sighted of the jury to have ignored this aspect of things and if I were Linus Torvald, I would share the prize with Stallman in a very public gesture. THIS would do wonders to advance open source/free software in the minds of many.
Re:Tech Acadamy of FINLAND!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
He says the truth. Stallman's "You're either with us, or against us." ideology would be completely toxic in a leader of a project like Linux.
Linus didn't set out to spread a philosophy, he set out to make something useful. He found a particular philosophy useful in the creation of this thing. Stallman is out to spread a religion.
Note that I say this with no intention to imply anything Stallman says or believes is wrong.
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
The first develop an operating system in the open and build a successful development community around that operating system. To encourage everyone - from hobbyist to multinational corporation to participate in its development and benefit from it without looking for personal compensation.
Re:Tech Acadamy of FINLAND!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Stallman is out to spread a religion.
I've always found Stallman's approach to be totally practical, and requiring no leap of faith or belief in intangible entities at all. In fact, there is a huge body of evidence that the tools he has created (Gnu, GPL, etc) are well-designed and effective.
I'd see him more as a very focussed craftsman or artisan than a preacher.
Re:Tech Acadamy of FINLAND!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sharing is good. The utilities that Stallman rewrote are historic, and have their origins in BSD, which is a version of Unix. The leadership in making the Linux kernel evolve stands on the shoulders of many, but riding several thousand elephants at once stands out for Linus. Stallman: somewhat solo. Linus: lasso'd a hurricane.
Misnomer? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded ever two years
Wouldn't that make it "The Biennial Technology Prize?"