An interview with Linus Torvalds

["Ruchir Tewari" <ruchir_tewari@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.indiatimes.com/infotech/feature/Interviews/linustrovalds.html

We?ll all leave traces in the sand

LINUS Torvalds is the man who created Linux. He wrote the Linux kernel while 
a student at Helsinki University, Finland. He took some time off his busy 
schedule to talk about the future of Linux and his views about other 
operating systems.

Do you see the growth of Linux in the enterprise, home PC?s or in the non-PC 
market?
I don?t know. As a Transmeta person, I can say the non-pc market. The 
advantage of PCs is that they?re standard and they?re really cheap to make 
because they?re standard.

Maybe a new standard is coming up. Anybody who is interested in any emerging 
technology these days, they tend to actually look at Linux first because 
it?s so easy to adopt. Maybe we?ll all leave traces in the sand.

For adoption of Linux in the enterprise, people need some standardisation. 
Where is the standardisation heading towards?
There are actually a lot of these things going on. The LSB is the most well 
known. At the same time I kind of disagree because I think that one of the 
strengths of Linux is that there has been more than one Linux.

If you look at Linux 6-7 years ago, the main distribution was slackware and 
another one. The upside of many distributions is that there?s competition 
and the best one wins.

The downside is the fragmentation. You have to balance the upside and 
downside of competition and so far it?s been fairly successful. There 
haven?t been that many problems. I think that?s the problem with Microsoft.

They haven?t very much competition and they haven?t had any reason to be 
aggressive in any other sense than economic.

Are you going to do anything to ensure that the Linux gets easier to use?
I?m more into the hardcore kernel development. We do things like that (plug 
and play).

To me it?s very important to have easy-to-install hardware so the kernel 
will just find it automatically and configure it so you don?t have to.

That?s important especially for PCs because there?s just so much hardware 
that it?s very hard to configure unless it?s done automatically for you. In 
the end most of the end-user, easy to use stuff on the desktop will be easy 
to do.

Do you see a market for more than one free operating system?
Yeah. Basically depending on research patterns, there?s a lot of power to 
having a generic OS. That?s part of why people want to go to Linux on 
embedded devices and supercomputers because it?s a powerful notion to have a 
similar environment regardless of where you are.

But there?s also downsides to being too generic. Some OS that is specific to 
some need is always going to be able to provide for that.

What if Microsoft decides to open source Windows?
That?s never going to happen but if it does then I?m all for it.

Will it affect Linux in any way?