'fin marvelous
and I think his contribution to human culture will only be reappraised upwards with the passage of time.
Linus Torvalds picked up his share of the world's largest technology award, the Millennium Prize, along with a check for €600,000 ($752,000) at a ceremony in Finland. For the first time in the history of the award, the judging panel from the Technology Academy Finland couldn't choose among the contenders and decided to split …
What did Linus do? He created a naive kernel, after studying C for one year. The code was bad. (According to Tanenbaum). And then he took the GNU software and finalized Stallmans vision of GNU - an OS that is not Unix. Well, Linux is certainly not Unix. And Stallman planned this for decades. And who gets all credit? Stallman? No. And if you ask Linus about it, he just brushes this question away.
-No you shouldnt call it GNU/Linux, why should you. The OS should be called Linux. What has GNU to do with it?
I dont buy that a person with such a huge ego as Linus, allows someone else to name his baby. I would not be surprised if he deliberately called it Linux. If you create something, do you allow someone else to govern? No. What would happen if I changed the name of his software from Git to Dis? He would not allow it. He also have said
-This is called Git and now I have named two of my projects after me.
It's not so much that his code was bad, although obviously anyone starting out writing a kernel will learn a lot from there on. No, the real disagreement is over the way the kernel is designed. It is a monolithic kernel and years ago the opinion was that monolithic kernels were old hat and microkernels were the way forward.
Of course, there's been all sorts of different kernels and some even take bits of each such as the Amiga kernel. WIndows has a bit of a mishmash of kernel ideas.
Personally I think that what people consider to be "Linux" is not what Linus has created. The kernel is important but it isn't what people think Linux is, they're more likely to talk about the command line, Apache web server or Gnome/KDE.
The hardware support of Linux is the big strength, it supports a lot of hardware but at the same time this means that the kernel grows larger and larger. I used to roll my own kernels but it was becoming extremely tiresome due to the vast amounts of options in the kernel config pages.
"years ago the opinion was that monolithic kernels were old hat and microkernels were the way forward."
Tends to be like that, anything new is supposed to have great advantages compared to all that old hat.
The word monolithic had to be "invented" because of this new word micro kernel.
No doubt, micro kernel sounds more modern and fine than mononolithic.
Linus wanted a Minix free kernel and did not see any advantage in the micro kernel.
Even if there could be some advantage when building the kernel a micro kernel will always
be slower than a monolithic kernel. To day there is absolutely no interest in the micro kernel,
not even Hurd is 100% micro kernel and may or may not be finished.
Minix may live on but I don't believe any supercomputers will be built using it.
The micro kernel is dead because there are no advantages bigger than the disadvantages.
Linux is the kernel but the press and people just find it easier to call the whole package with some desktop like KDE or Gnome simply Linux.
On the other hand in embedded devices the word Linux is hard to find. A D-link router has something printed about the GPL.
Anyway, Linus is worth his prize.
Tanenbaum's remark that he would give Linus a failing grade in his OS course was mostly around Linus' choice of a monolithic kernel, with some added sledging about using 386-specific features that would reduce Linux's future portability.
OTOH, Tanenbaum in the same USENET posting also said that "a multithreaded file system is only a performance hack" and that buffer cache on multiuser machines would often be so big as to remove the need for multithreaded filesystems/IO systems, so it's not like he was being quite so forward-thinking as to where Linux might end up... (at my work there are tens of Lustre file servers that regularly have 50 outstanding filesystem ops each, despite having 48GB of memory, and together they manage to serve a 1500 node cluster at up to 16GB/sec of real throughput - enough real work going on there to justify multiple concurrent filesystem and disk operations? :-)
"What did Linus do? He created a naive kernel, after studying C for one year. ... And then he took the GNU software and finalized Stallmans vision of GNU ... And who gets all credit? "
Thorvalds never underestimated the work that Stallman put into GNU. It's just a fact that Thorvalds managed to bridge that gap that Stallman - even two decades later - never got around to.
I believe that to a large extent, this is due to personality. Thovalds is the benevolent dictator: Technically competent, with enough people skills to drive people forward. Stallman may be brighter when it comes to technology, but has an absolutely abhorrent personality.
The comment about socialism was rather tongue-in-cheek. Being motivated by something other than money while giving away the results of your hard work is altruist, not socialist. Richard Stallman is a socialist (communist, liberal, democrat, etc). Linus is just an all-around cool guy.
Jeremy Allison (Samba) - on GPL "I instantly recognized it for what it was: Socialism. Coming from Europe, where socialism isn't a dirty word, I had no problem with it."
Note to Americans - socialism means people getting together to organise those bits of society where everyone benefits from them being there however much they individually pay toward them. Like roads, police, fire engines or the Army
See also Liberal, which also appears to be regularly employed as an abusive reference in The Former Colonies.
There again (and I speak here as someone who put many hours in trudging the streets delivering election literature and the like for the old Liberal party) I'm beginning to think they might just have a point there... :-)
and to Linus ! If that great engineer, humanitarian, and entertainer Steven Anthony Ballmer calls it «communism», you know that you're on the right track. As a long-time Ubuntu user (ever since Dapper), I'm most grateful for thecontributions of people like Mr Stallman, Linus, and the thousands of others who have contributed to making GNU/Linux the fantastic - and constantly evolving - operating system it is....
Henri