Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, May 19th, 2006

CNN Interview with Linus Torvalds – The Reclusive World Traveler…

Interesting CNN interview with Linus. You can really see his personality come out, but one interesting piece is when Kristie Lu Stout from CNN asked just how big is the Linux developer community. Linus’ response:

I actually only work with a few handfuls so I tend to directly interact with maybe 10 – 20 people and they in turn interact with other people. So depending on how you count, if you count just the core people, 20 -50 people. If you count everybody who’s involved; five thousand people — and you can really put the number anywhere in between…

It’s crazy for me to think just how far Linux and open source has come that CNN is leading interviews suggesting that open source has hit the tipping point and is now mainstream (we all know it already has but if you’re reading this site, you’re probably close to the ground… CNN reporters… probably not).

Linus made one comment that I completely agree with and would just like to point out:

LT: In fact I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples’ ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn’t do. So openness is not something new, it is something that actually has worked for a long time.

And for others like our friends up in the Northwest to say that open source isn’t commercial or is not ‘reliable or dependable’ means science is not reliable or dependable… and yet most science is commercially appropriated… and most science is actually fairly reliable… hmm… wires crossed or our our friends up in the Northwest just absolutely blind to reality?? After all these years, Ballmer saying Windows needs to catch up, and market realities of Linux being the #2 OS, they still think it’s unreliable and not dependable??

Hmmm… Netcraft? so roughly 65% of domains are running on unreliable and non-dependable Apache software that doesn’t have a commercial model… right.