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Linus One of Fortune's "People to Watch in 2000" 79

Posted by Hemos from the well-of-course dept.
neal writes "Fortune has an article that selects Linus as one of the'people' to watch in 2000! " Just another sign of the recognition that Linux and Open Source as a whole has garnered over the last eighteen months or so. Here's to 2000 being even better than 1999.
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Linus One of Fortune's "People to Watch in 2000" More

Linus One of Fortune's "People to Watch in 2000"

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  • It's amazing how much positive feedback that one man generates. There's not a lot of computer people we can point to that we can say, "Now THAT person embodies a lot of good things in the computer community, and good things to come."

    Even MS boosters don't rally behind Bill like this. (I should know.)
  • That'll be the Jeff Bezos who heads up the Fortune list of people to watch list...

    Or didn't you read the article?

  • he should have been man of the year since he got linux rolling...
  • who cares?

    I care. When I have the need to use a strange new hardware device that I don't know much about, I find that the kernel Mr. Torvalds shapes is easy to configure, debug, and fix. Might I mention that the kernel is very flexible and most reliable. So, I'm not surprised when a kernel he hacks creates a great impact on the computing industry. If you don't watch what he does, you might be in the dark.
  • According to the article, Linux Torvalds works free for Transmeta. I did not know that. Confirmations anyone?

  • The vaguely anticapitalist crusade is about the only faintly new comment, and only insofar as that's a three word way of nicely describing the ambiguity of the relationship between "free software" and "business."

    Boy, this is liable turn into an illuminating thread... NOT.

  • he was one of People's "25 most intriguing people of '99" :)

  • Well, this is going to start one more of those long whiny threads about "well why the hell does it matter?" that followed the Time POTMillennium article. (Or will it? After all, this is Linus himself...)

    So let me get in my $0.02: it does matter. Your marketroids and PHBs will look at Fortune, and say, ooo, Linux! A new buzzword! And maybe, just maybe, they'll ask their sysadmin to try it out, instead of attempting to install it themselves on their ultra-new winmodem-equipped laptop. One can wish, right? Especially in this season?

    As for AE on the cover of Time magazine, maybe they'll say, ooo, Einstein. Isn't he the E=mc^2 dude? and then take a few moments to learn about some of the radical and cool stuff physics / astronomy has accomplished in the last fifty years. (And let me assure the unconvinced - long after the Civil war, India's independence and even WWII have faded into obscurity as long-ago provincial conflicts, Einstein's accomplishments will be remembered and used on a daily basis!)

    Or maybe the PHB's will pick up a few more unemployed physics grad students? That wouldn't be so bad either... :)

  • I think the point the original poster made (I'm a bit surprised, too) is not that he works for free for Transmeta but that he works for free for Transmeta. Can this be confirmed?

    Eric

  • in good company? (Score:3)

    by nocent ( 71113 ) on Monday December 27, 1999 @06:55AM (#1442832)
    In case you were wondering, these are the other people that Fortune has picked besides Linus as people to watch in 2000:

    Jeff Bezos- Amazon.com
    Mike Armstrong- AT&T
    Jill Barad- Mattel
    Jeffrey Immelt- General Electric
    Michael Eisner/Steve Jobs- as Disney/Pixar and not as Apple CEO
    David Komansky- Merrill Lynch
    John Reed / Robert Rubin / Sandy Weill- Citicorp
    Bill Ford Jr- Ford Motor Co.
    Mary Meeker- Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
    Chris Gent- Vodafone
    Nobuyuki Idei- Sony
    Bill Gates- Microsoft
    Lou Gerstner- IBM
    Peter Drucker- business management guru
    Carly Fiorina- HP

    Linus was listed last in this list.







  • If you want to pay me for losing money and then hype me up as an "ingenius innovator" I'll send you my address...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Hmm, Linus, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, and Jeff Bezos: only four computer people. Or should that be : wow, four computer people. In any case, I think only one (guess which) is a real computer person, the others are just businessmen who have something to do with computers.

  • Every good ship needs a figurehead. (Score:3)

    by belgin ( 111046 ) on Monday December 27, 1999 @07:08AM (#1442838) Homepage
    And for the GPL, the media has selected Linus Torvalds. There are people who have only the vaguest idea of what that free software thingy is, but they have heard of Linus Torvalds to one degree or another. As /. discussion on the TIME POTC pointed out, it is not always the most talented or brilliant who becomes the icon for an ideal, but the one percieved to start things and is known to the people.

    Another example of this in American history is General George Washington. He hardly ever won a battle in our Revolutionary War, but was hailed a great leader of men and was pretty much offered the position of King of the United States of America, if he wanted it. (He didn't.) It doesn't matter too much what he did and didn't do, because he was a cultural icon. He symbolized a great freedom in the minds of the residents of a struggling group of colonies, and later in a young nation. Einstien also falls into the category of cultural icons for the twentieth century.

    Linus is stepping into the same role (on a smaller scale for now) in the concept of open source. People outside the open source community see him and say, "Oh, that's the guy who wrote Linux. He represents that free software movement." Whether it is good or bad, this is the path that I see before us.

    B. Elgin

  • He has children to support. He's not living in a cheap part of the country. I doubt he's volunteering at a commercial company. (Especially when every article about his says that he works there, as does he.)
  • I'm not going to claim that I'm a specialist or anything like that, but didn't it say that he worked "free for Transmeta" and not " for free for Transmeta"? One can debate the difference of course, but the point the editor is trying to make I guess is that Linus isn't bound to Linux or any of the distributions.


    - JoJo
  • My 86 year old grandmother hasn't the slightest clue who Bill Gates is, but she read an article about linus recently (I believe it was in a tabloid), and was asking me about him. And no, I wasn't flipping out on him. I apologize if it came out like that. I was actually just trying to add some humor to a rather boring monday.
    =======
    There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
  • It's *Fortune* magazine, not What-Geek?

    Of course it's business people, but then they shape the business.

    Linus made it into the list I suspect as symbolic of the Linux dot IPO dot frenzy.

    BTW, Steve Jobs? You may have noticed him on the list, had a little to do with Apple. Nobuyuki Idei, Sony president, they do plenty with computers and more importantly consumer electronics. Mary Meeker's an internet analyst;
    isn't that computing related enough either? And Mike Armstrong, AT&T... nah, they have nothing to
    do with computing...

    The list shows computing and it's uses are all pervasive.



  • Interesting. You're calling me an idiot, yet you are unable to produce ONE sentance with correct grammer. Quite pitiful. My condolences to your family for having to raise you. And please, next time, I might take you just a bit more seriously if you had an actual account with /. It's not as though it would take a large amount of your precious time to set up... Time that you could better use mating with you sister...
    =======
    There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
  • Indeed. What fascinates me is how much respect Linus gets. When he says something, people really listen. Contrast that to Bill Gates. Most people I know don't really care what he says.
    ----
  • I'm not going to claim that I'm a specialist or anything like that, but didn't it say that he worked "free for Transmeta" and not "for free for Transmeta"? One can debate the difference of course, but the point the editor is trying to make I guess is that Linus isn't bound to Linux or any of the distributions.

    I think that the point was supposed to be that he works on Linux freely, and for Transmeta.. Odd way of wording that though.. I'm sure Transmeta pays the man. :-)


    ---
  • Just because your grandmother - who must know nothing about the computer industry - accidentally happened upon an article about Linus, that doesnt mean that Linus is better known than Gates. The difference between the popularity of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds (regarding computers) is about the same as the difference between Albert Einstien (sp?) and Dmitri Medeleeff (regarding science).
  • Linux was, I'm sure, put on the list due to the sudden upsurge of popularity and fame regarding Linux. But, if I were choosing, I'd have had a hard time deciding who's responsible for Linux doing so well. Sure, Linus started it, but without many others, it probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere... The community as whole is self-reliant, and requires the whole of itself to thrive as it does. Linux is not now, nor has it really ever been, a one-person job, so it's hard to credit one person as being more important than others. Too bad it wasn't things to watch. I'd be much happier having seen "The Linux Community" instead of Linus.

    But good for him, nonetheless.
  • Umm, I guess they want to pay him because the company he created basically defined what a successful e-commerce operation should look like, beat much larger competitors hands down, and has been providing excellent service to bookworms like me all around the planet. They only recently screwed up with the "one-click" litigation issue.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
  • Why should he be man of the year, for this list anyway. For the list that this article is referring to, even Bill Gates is much more deserving of the title.
  • Rich CEO's, business gurus and ... a geeky open source celebrity? What a strange list.

  • And for the GPL, the media has selected Linus Torvalds.

    No, they didn't. The article didn't say anything about the GPL. If you were to poll the media, I'd say that a good number of them will have heard of Linux, and that the vast majority will have never heard of the GPL. The reason for the Linux hype is because it's quality free beer -- the "free speech" aspect has almost nil to do with its overall popularity. Why did you mention the GPL in regards to this article, anyway?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • RMS has insisted (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that it be called GNU/People to Watch because People to Watch is just the operational part of tha magazine, and without the GNU tools, there would be no People to Watch.

    He is also running off photocopies of the magazine because he of course touts Free Magazine through the GNU project.

  • I think it has a lot to do with his personality. If you've ever read any interview with Linus, you get the impression that he is a frank, straightforward man who has nothing to hide. He has his principles and plays by them. Contrast this with most top businessmen, (and please don't misunderstand, I'm not putting them down) who usually speaks in techno-babble (or is that biz-babble?) and try to sound "deep" with big words. They may not be insincere in any way, but somehow the "professional" and "biz" manner makes people feel they are far away. With someone like Linus, I think people can identify with him more. You almost feel like he is very approachable and won't turn up his nose with a "what a stinky beggar" attitude. (No, I'm not saying biz people have this attitude, but I'm talking about people's impressions here.)

    If I were to choose between the "Linus type" and the "big CEO type", I'd choose the former, even if the latter has bigger bucks. I think many people would do the same.

  • Ah, nice to see that someone around here has a sense of humor and irony.
    =======
    There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
  • Shut up karma whore. .. "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

    Come on buddy, you giving all us trolls a bad name.

  • He works free for a Silicon Valley chip-design startup called Transmeta.

    Since when? So basically Mr. Linus works for free, and then lives off stocks that CEO gave him? Nothing wrong with that, I would like some sweet Linux tech stocks.

    IIRC he got paid a crap load of money for developing a new generation CPU. I though he was still getting paid, maybe not.

    I would work for free if I got a crap load of differant Linux stocks and didn't have to worry about money and paying the bills.


    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use Joke()
    or die ("You can't take a joke!\n");

    But I think this is wrong. We need to take a stand and say "NO MORE SLAVE LINUZ LABOR! SET HIM FREE! NO MORE SLAVE LINUZ LABOR! SET HIM FREE!"

    Free Linuz
    Free your source
    Free your mind!



  • If you were to poll the media, I'd say that a good number of them will have heard of Linux, and that the vast majority will have never heard of the GPL.

    You are right. When I was writing my comment, I was doing something of a mad lib. People outside of the open source community tend to use the words GPL, Linux, free software movement, and open source VERY interchangably, when they know more than one of the words. I know this, because I spent a while at the outermost fringes of vague knowledge myself. I would still consider myself as a semi-knowledgable observer of the open source community more than a member of it.

    I simply used that random lack of knowledge in my comment to place terms where one of these buzzwords would go. I apologize for not making this clear in my original comment. I like to write comments that point out the perspective of those who are less knowledgable than the average /.er, and sometimes forget to document what I am doing.

    B. Elgin

  • I really hate to send a reply just to agree, but yes, they certainly do. Linus himself had stated that he's gotten his "well paid job at Transmeta" because of his success with Linux.

    The point he was trying to make while saying it (in an interview last summer) was that even though he hasn't made any money off the actual Linux source, Linux and the fame it brought him has gotten him a nice paycheck at Transmeta.

    And yes, very odd wording indeed.


    - JoJo
  • wow that was really creative, in an intensely funny kind of way. You're my hero.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Another example of this in American history is General George Washington. He hardly ever won a battle in our Revolutionary War, but was hailed a great leader of men and was pretty much offered the position of King of the United States of America, if he wanted it.


    I think you're short-changing Washington here. In military terms, he was responsible for the Trenton/Princeton campaign of 1776 (which had a crucial impact on colonial morale), and the final campaign of the war which ended with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. In less tangible terms, he inspired a great deal of loyalty in his troops, which no doubt enabled the army to endure in very difficult circumstances.

    The point of this is that while Washington may be mythologized, he really does have some pretty important accomplishments to his name. Hope this didn't get too far off-topic, but I thought it was worth mentioning since you were comparing Washington and Linus.
  • Once you're branded a computer person can you ever not be one?

    Bill Gates used to be a computer person he even wrote some useful programs... Of course that was before he went to the dark side.

    But that would make 2 actual computer people on the list, and a lot of buisness people related to computers.

    To be exact:
    Linus, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, Jeff Bezos,
    Steve Jobs, and Lou Gerstner

  • Who's Dmitri Medeleeff? :) From some searching I did, I believe the name is Mendeleeff and he published Periodic Law of the Elements. I found this [utexas.edu] link on yahoo and google. Pretty weak...but it mentions his name!:)
  • The point of this is that while Washington may be mythologized, he really does have some pretty important accomplishments to his name. Hope this didn't get too far off-topic, but I thought it was worth mentioning since you were comparing Washington and Linus.

    I agree with you.

    Washington did some very important things for the American Revolution, but I was trying to illustrate that the public faith in him outstripped his actual accomplishments. Similarly, Linus is often credited as if he is solely responsible for everything that Linux has become.

    Important figures they both are/were, but their actions did not correlate with the full degree of respect and credit they are given. This is why they are cultural icons. Their great actions inspired further actions that led to a great result. Culturally, they are often creditied with all the results of people who followed their examples. This is also true of Ghandi, Einstein, even Hitler, and countless others, good and bad.

    B. Elgin

  • Last time I checked, a -589% EPS was NOT successful (See for yourself [quicken.com]).

    I work for a company that builds .com businesses, and we laugh whenever we hear about Bezos, etc. He typifies the American "get rich quick" Dream which has been exponentiated by the ridiculousness of Yahoo's $400+ stock price. He ran what would have been the greatest e-commerce business model into the ground because he was impatient. Amazon will not be profitable for at least 3-5 for years (and that's generous). That is, unless they reincarnate Sam Walton to run their warehouses, or merge with FedEx or UPS. Watching Bezos strip Amazon's gears gave me more respect for *gasp* Bill Gates and what he was able to do business-wise in a new field with technology back in the day.

    Sure, I'm jealous. But he still ain't Man of the Year.

  • Well, I am the original poster, and this is a rather amusing thread. If any of you had actually read my question, you can see that I question Linus working FREE, that's right, FREE for Transmeta. The article points out that Linus works free for Transmeta. Therefore I question it.

  • Sorry about the mispelled name, I didnt catch it on my preview. And correct, he did create the Periodic Table and was the first to start putting elements into families (such as alkali metals and halogens).
  • ...or People's Sexiest Man Alive? --I saw what you did,and I know who you are.

  • Heh, I gotcha, no problemo. Re-reading what I wrote, I didn't mean to be so brusque with you -- I had some dog barking in my ear and took my annoyance out on you. Take care.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Linux's linux waslucky to get the recognition that it does. once windows came out computers became "user friendly". most kids raised on windows who are now teenagers or in the early twenties all realized it suck at a bout the same time.. being the rebels that our generation is we go against the grain and look for an os unlike windows..this generation also being lazy apathetic idiots was in need of an os that was simple like window so it can be easily matered, once master of linux this teen could brag to his other nerd friends that he know linux. thus it spreads through peer pressure... linus was lucky that his os was to say "at the right place at the right time" i predict linux will fall soon and sell out and some other underground os will pickup say maybe v2
  • Bill Gates, the visionary who did'nt mention the Internet ONCE in his visionary book "The Road Ahead" in 1995.
  • and that about did it for me! she read about openSource in Atlantic Monthly. so he is getting well known outside geeky circles and squares.

    i *knew* she was meant for me, asked her out again. and the rest is history. thanks OpenSource and Linus for providing this litmus test.






  • Please don't try to isolate the bug and send a report to Rob Malda--he would really hate that. It's much easier for him to find and fix the way you reported it.
  • who are "m$ supporters" ?

    !?

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