Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systemssuch as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition...
NationalityFinnish
ProfessionEngineer
Date of Birth28 December 1969
CityHelsinki, Finland
CountryFinland
I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.
I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose - there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime.
Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.
Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money. As such, I'm not very likely to make the same kind of money that Bill made.
Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.
One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.
I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.
If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.
Conversion isn't going to happen. I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code.
didn't really think there was that much tension between the commercial side and the technical side of Linux.
I don't use GNOME, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
I don't expect the desktop to come quickly. It will take time,
I was going to start with a lawyer joke, but I'm told it was already done yesterday,
Software patents are a huge potential threat to the ability of people to work together on open source. Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat.