Robert Pogson

There is a good interview with Linus Torvalds. It covers patents, development, licenses, the desktop and fun.

Here are some gems:

• I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart – nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.

• I compare it with science and witchcraft (or alchemy). Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.

• Yes. It’s still why I do it. The parts I do that end up beign fun have been different over the years – it used to be purely about the coding, these days I don’t write all that much code myself, and now it’s mostly about the organizational side: merging code, communicating with people, pointing people in the right direction, and then the occasional bugfixing myself.

You have to admire a man who is so knowledgeable in his field and who finishes with accomplishment instead of FUD.