Excellent interview [LWN.net]

Excellent interview

Posted Aug 18, 2004 15:57 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339)
Parent article: Linus Torvalds' Benevolent Dictatorship (Business Week)

I am always amazed, pleasantly, at Linus' responses to loaded questions and especially his penchant for stiff-arming the "opposition" with a turn of phrase. Examples in this article:

Turning the looming threat over MSFT patent attacks against Linux into a matter of Bill's and Steve's personal pride over winning via innovation versus litigation
Besting the "Cathederal and Baazar" analogy to a simpler and more loaded analogy between the scientific method and witchcraft.
Exposing the marketing circus behind so-called "innovation" versus publicly exposed hardwork
Putting the lie to FUD about re-using good ideas with a simple Eistein analogy
Explaining his key role while diminishing his theoretical importance
Deflating the potential controversy over the more-of-the-same contribution sign-off procedures
Diminishing the importance of proprietary OS and other software infrastucture as products in themselves
Re-phrasing Open Source vs Closed Source in terms of the Scientific Method versus methods long ago abandoned in favor of the former.
Flipping the FUD of anti-Americanism (i.e., it's an anti-American thing to hurt the US dominance in software development) into a matter of American pride (i.e., the US needs to adopt the best tools and methods to continue to innovate).

His deftness in the media is a real asset to the whole community.

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Europe

Posted Aug 18, 2004 18:51 UTC (Wed) by andrel (subscriber, #5166) [Link]

Plenty of Europeans are inarticulate. More relevant: Linus's parents are journalists and his father is a politician.

Finland

Posted Aug 19, 2004 8:41 UTC (Thu) by chepelov (guest, #23542) [Link]

Is his father still active in politics? IIRC, Linus stated he will not settle back to Finland (too cold or not enough sunlight, or something to that effect). Wouldn't that hurt his father's career?

Anyway, parent is right: growing up in a highly media-aware environment certainly helps more with being articulate and a good handler of journalists than growing up in one or another $LOCALE.

Finland

Posted Aug 19, 2004 13:38 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Is his father still active in politics?

Nils Torvalds never was a visible figure in Finnish politics. I only remember hearing about him as the father of Linus. If Wikipedia is to be believed, he is more a journalist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Torvalds

Excellent interview

Posted Aug 18, 2004 22:46 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

It might have been clearer if he had said "alchemy" rather than "witchcraft", since this is really what he was describing (the alchemists made many important discoveries, but as they didn't share them, progress was extremely slow).

He did not say in this article what he has said elsewhere, that most of the interesting work these days is not done in the kernel and thus he has nothing to do with it (even from a management standpoint). The trade press is not clear on this.