I don’t have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I’m doing.
I’m perfectly happy complaining, because it’s cathartic, and I’m perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime – not programming.
I’ve actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that’s because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.
It’s a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I’m only doing the kernel – I always found everything around it to be completely boring.
Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That’s my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.
To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don’t you? Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
I’m sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.
There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
There’s innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I’m proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren’t in other operating systems.
To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person’s trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.
The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It’s up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.
Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.
What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.
When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
If you want an application to be portable, you don’t necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.
No problem is so big that it can’t be run away from.
I’m interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn’t started as any kind of rebellion against the ‘evil Microsoft empire.’
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.