What Torvalds really thinks of Solaris
Published: 21 Dec 2004 15:20 GMT
Do you think the Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) project to clone Unix and the GPL -- foundations for Linux, obviously -- could have happened without Richard Stallman's big vision?
I think it could have happened without him, but that's like saying "what would the world look like if X [some arbitrary great person] hadn't been born?" It would be different, and there's no question that the kind of drive that you get from having a vision is very powerful.
So you might as well have asked whether Linux would have happened without me. Obviously not in that sense. But maybe one of the BSD [versions of Unix] would have grown up instead. Or some other crazy undergrad would have done his own operating system.
Why did you select the GPL to govern Linux, and what kinds of changes would you like to see in the next version?
I really want a licence to do just two things: make the code available to others, and make sure that improvements stay that way. That's really it. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything else is fluff.
It may sound like a very simple concept, but even most open source licences fail my criteria very fundamentally. They tend to fail in allowing somebody to limit the availability of improvements some way.
And the thing is, in my fuzzy "cannot plan his way out of a cardboard box" world, I don't worry too much about the next version of the GPL. I'm not a lawyer, I don't worry about the exact wording. In many ways, my only gripe with the GPL has been how many words it seems to need to say something very simple. That seems to be a common theme in any legal situation.
How is the kernel-development process changing?
The biggest change was probably that I expected to open up a 2.7 tree but didn't really relish the notion. Nobody argued strenuously for that, and instead there was a fairly widely held belief that the current 2.6.x development model actually works pretty well.
Which is not to say that 2.7.x won't happen -- it probably will in a few months -- but it does mean that the stable release branches are starting to overshadow the development ones. I think that's both a sign of maturity and of the fact that the stable releases are so important to so many people these days that you can't leave them behind as easily.
Does the new process mean improvements make it into Linux faster?
Yes. That's one of the advantages of this model -- much lower latency of new things. People always hated the two-year development cycle, as you could tell from how all the threading work we did for 2.6.x ended up being back-ported into 2.4.x because vendors just couldn't wait for it.
What changes are radical enough to trigger the 2.7 tree release?
If I knew, I'd tell you. It basically boils down to: "Do we need to change something so fundamental that we can no longer assume that the things that rely on it work the same way any more?" All the previous development cycles have had core issues that we knew we needed to fix, but that would cause major havoc in the parts that used that core infrastructure.
How many developers do you estimate are working on Linux today? I'm guessing a small fraction of people contribute a large fraction of the code.
It's pretty skewed, yes. On just the kernel, there's a couple of hundred fairly active people. The change logs show about a thousand people in the last year, but many of those are people dipping their toes in the water. And that's totally ignoring a large set of developers, namely the ones that do testing and (quality assurance) and feedback.
What do you think about the increasing prominence of Red Hat and Novell in the Linux marketplace? Does it trouble you that they're increasingly the ones who define Linux for customers instead of you?
Heh. The less I have to do with customers, the better. I've always felt that the biggest contribution the commercial vendors do is exactly the fact that they end up being the interface between customers and developers, and that they also thus end up being the balance between purely technical issues and the purely marketing thing. And open source keeps them (and the developers, for that matter) honest.
Does it seem to you that the Linux sellers are driving the Linux train and you're becoming more of a passenger?
Not to me, it doesn't. I don't think the vendors think that either. But they certainly have a lot of input. That's how it needs to be: People need to feel involved... If anybody feels like somebody is just a passenger, that's bad for everybody.
Is the limiting factor for Linux on the desktop engineering or marketing?
It's a combination of things. [There's] engineering in the sense that there's a lot of details around that can be improved, there's the marketing/perception side and most importantly there's the "user inertia" side.
People tend to stay with (and like) the thing they are used to, and I think that has been the biggest limiting factor for the last year or so, and is only getting more so -- i.e., the technology is there, but people aren't mentally ready to make the switch. That's why I think the commercial desktop is important: It's what made DOS (and later Windows) feel familiar to people, and I think that's where the more general desktop push ends up happening. But it's going to take years.
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