Is Linus Torvalds even speaking for Linux anymore?
Even though Linus Torvalds has always been known as a deity-like figure in the world of Linux, lately he has been quite outspoken about where he thinks his operating system is going and what its competitors are doing wrong.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Torvalds had quite a few complaints to bring against both Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista.
"I don't think they're equally [updated to fix word] flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said. But then he added: "OS X is in some ways actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."
"I think [Mac] OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways," he continued. "But neither can hold a candle to my own [Linux]. It's a race for second."
And while you would expect this kind of propaganda from the operating system's founder, does he even speak to (or for) the Linux community anymore? If you ask me, he's just another wolf howling in the night hoping someone will agree.
Why you ask? Because although Torvalds has his own belief about what Linux is and should be going forward, the vast majority of its users disagree. Let's face it -- if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention.
"An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people."
Sure, that statement makes some sense, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the design and usability factor that makes the operating system much easier to use. And while both Mac OS X and Windows have their issues, for the average person, it makes more sense to use those than Linux.
And perhaps that's where the troubles lie. In the beginning, Linux was supposed to be the advanced techie's dream operating system that would allow them to do whatever they wanted at any time. And although that dream was perpetuated for years, businesses have come in and created distributions that make it more pleasing to the general public because of their desire to turn a profit.
To make matters worse, it's that same mentality that Torvalds espouses that has held the operating system back from becoming a major player in the business. According to its most recent research data, NetApp found that Linux commanded just 0.67 percent of the OS market in January and was barely leading the iPhone, which came in at 0.13 percent of total market share.
But maybe that's what Torvalds really wants: a niche operating system that has a cult-like following and harbors very little appeal to more than 98 percent of the world's computer users. But then again, maybe he doesn't.
In another interview with the Linux Foundation, Torvalds bemoaned Windows' command of the market, but said that Microsoft has created mistakes that may open the door for the open source community: "The desktop itself is something that people aren't necessarily interested in new features and I think that actually is something that helps open source because now you can't have one company that kind of tries to move the goal post because if it keeps trying to move the goal post, that's just going to irritate that company's own constituents."
So which one is it? First Torvalds says he's proud to be the alternative to those awful companies that release operating systems for the sole purpose of power and money, but then he tells the Linux Foundation that there's a strong chance that Linux can grow because of that. And to make matters worse, the operating system's most popular distributions are being used as money-making tools already -- just look at Ubuntu and Dell for all the proof you need for that assertion.
The truth of the matter is Linux was originally developed to abandon the idea that beauty and "hand-holding" was necessary to create a great operating system and it became somewhat of a counter-culture. And as Torvalds continues to hold on to that dream, he is seeing his valued community take on a life of its own and he is being pushed even deeper into the realm of insignificance.
Is he still the voice of Linux? Sure. But unlike years ago when he was the only person espousing the Linux creed, he has lost his pulpit and dozens of other spokespeople have risen from the ruins.
It's time the Linux community finally wakes up and decides which way it will turn -- towards its roots or towards the features that the general public really wants. Until then, we'll have the old guard spewing their ideals, while the momentum of the operating system carries it away from its very foundation.
Suffice it to say, Linux is moving away from its founding ideals and not even Linus Torvalds can change it.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
What you should look for is whether there is an application that runs on GNU/Linux (so, it's very likely to be a free software), that has the functionality you want. For example, if you need office suite, you are going to have hard time making MS Office run on GNU/Linux. On the other hand, if you can live with OpenOffice (most people can, in fact), that's what you use in GNU/Linux (or in Windows, for that matter).
I could list a bunch of free software alternatives here, but without knowing what you want, it's probably waste of space, so I'll just say Google-searching for "[application name] free alternative" or "[application name] open source alternative" might get you started.
If Linux was so disfunctional and user unfriendly, none of the above people would ever stand a chance.
BTW, for those bemoaning command lines and such, I'll put PCLinuxOS and KDE up against a Mac any day. I can't say that my experience is exactly what others are getting, but I've yet to use the command line at all in PCLinuxOS. Everything works, too. Besides, Mac users have embraced the command line, themselves. Just look around at some of the how-to articles on the Mac. They have command line hacks to change stuff. After all, it is Unix...
As far as your favorite app running in Linux, that's a matter of getting those companies to support Linux. The user base is growing, and all sorts of cool new devices are hitting the market like the EeePC thar run Linux. It's just a matter of time until enough marketshare is obtained that companies like Intuit, Adobe, Quark, and others will be forced to support Linux. Besides, there are alternatives that are very usable and very viable, while being completely free to use. They may not match feature to feature with your favorite, but in some areas you'll be surprised that they're actually better. Overall, though, unless you're a serious power user, you won't miss MS Office much with both KOffice and Open Office available, complete with enough features to meet 90% of user's needs.
Linus Torvalds is the one who wrote the kernel of the operating system called GNU/Linux, but the founder is Richard Stallman. He is the founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation.
The whole operating system works because of these two people, compared to which you are nothing but ****. So your views are worth a little less than ****.
The kernel and a great deal of the OS was, and continues to be written using tools from the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman's group. Very good tools, too. Probably the best in the business.
For all that Stallman hasn't contributed as much as a semi colon of code to Linux and the only reason that it's often mistakenly called GNU/Linux is that Stallman refuses to speak to the computer press unless they call it that while they speak to him.
Torvalds himself has never used the term GNU/Linux and, in fact, owns the trade marks on Linux.
According to NetApp, that market share is defined as "This report lists the market share of the top operating systems in use for browsing (not servers). This data is derived by aggregating the traffic across our network of websites that use our service. "
So it's not Linux's share of the os market, it's Linux's share of browsers that are accessing sites monitored by netapp. So you've tossed out Linux's server OS market share and you're assuming that netapp monitored sites are the sorts of sites that a linux using demographic would go to.
I also think you've fallen into the Kernel Vs Distro trap. Linus looks after the kernel and has never been that concerned with the Desktop (though he has his personal preferences, just like everybody else) as that is somebody else's problem - namely the desktop developers (the Gnome & KDE guys) and the Distro developers (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc). It's a bit like saying the developers behind the Windows kernel speak to and for all Microsoft developers and products, which they clearly don't.
"The truth of the matter is Linux was originally developed to abandon the idea that beauty and "hand-holding" was necessary to create a great operating system and it became somewhat of a counter-culture."
No, the truth of the matter is that Linux was originally developed because some kid in Finland wanted a better Unix clone on the 386 than Minix could provide. The "counter-culture" happened because he wasn't alone in that desire and so people joined in on Linux. Linux quickly gained popularity because at the time BSD was embroiled in a legal battle with AT&T and the FSF/GNU were completely unable to get their Hurd kernel out the door.
No one person in the open source community speaks for the entire community - most everyone speaks for themselves. There are a few people who can speak for individual projects (such as Linus and the Kernel) but no one can speak on behalf of everything. A few people have claimed that they speak for everyone, but they're just being deluded (and I say this on behalf of everyone in the open source community :-).
Remember when Linux came out? Was it 1990/1? What was Microsoft doing? Windows 3.0 or Windows 2.0? Did Microsoft do TCP/IP (read "The Internet") yet? I think they were still hoping it would go away.
So maybe the author of this 'article' should learn the differences between these concepts before making pathetic attempts at ridiculous statements.
The operating system is linux, not GNU/linux
So maybe the author of this 'article' should learn the differences between these concepts before making pathetic attempts at ridiculous statements.
To put it in to perspective, Linus rights the kernel that many 'Linux' distrobutions use. This is basically how the OS actually functions. Everything you seem to be talking about involve the GUI, that's graphical user interface. When the GUI is made it uses API calls to talk to the kernel to get you get stuff done. If you had access to Windows source code you could put the Windows GUI on the Linux kernel and have a Linux distrobution that looks like Windows.
I ask you, do you think that Apple's OSX is easy to use? The OS GUI is designed to be used by 'newbie' computer users. In fact for a while an actual selling point for Macs were that because they had a single mouse button they would confuse their customers less.
I'd say that most anything by Apple is easy to use. But did you know OSX is based off of a Linux distrobution? Apparently not from your article.
I suggest you start doing some reasearch before you post more articles. Spreading misnformation just isn't right, and that is exactly what you are doing. Possibly on purpose. But I'm willing to bet you just didn't look up the inticrasies of computer OSes.
Linus is the leader of a group of people who create one component of the operating system called the Kernel. This component is largely hidden away from the user, and the only effects it has are ones of stability, performance, etc. While this largely the lynch-pin of the operating system, the Graphical aspects, and "user friendlyness" the user sees are developed by an entirely separate group of people. Those people likely don't listen to what Linus has to say about Kernel development because it's mostly irrelevant to them.
Is he after page hits? Controversy? Fame? Ridicule?
Inigo Montoya, "The Princess Bride"
In this case the word is "Operating System"
Also, this article claims "Linux commanded just 0.67 percent of the OS market". I am curious to learn more about that statistic. Are you including servers in this number?
I run a large network for a financial services company and we use mostly Linux. Linux out-performs all of its peers when used in server applications. It is also more stable and secure. Additionally is is gaining market share in more and more main stream industries. All of this is dependent on the kernel Linus maintains. So, regarding Mr Torvalds "being pushed even deeper into the realm of insignificance" I doubt there is much to worry about there.
Fair Winds,
You do not understand the Linux community. Linus Torvalds is a very clever person, very funny and likes to say things here and there. But we don't listen for what he says but for what he does: awesome kernel programming. "Talk is cheap, show me the code": this is the real Linus Torvalds speaking.
We don't listen to Mr Stallman, but we care for what he does: a beautiful GPL. All the GNU/Linux thing is built around that, and that's what we care.
Linux (or GNU/Linux) is not a one man project. If you need to understand this you should check with Ian Murdoch what was he thinking when he started Debian, as Debian is the best way to understand the Linux Community. So many times it was said Debian was doomed and it just gets better.
Mr Mark Shuttleworth built a shagadellic distro called Ubuntu based on Debian, and he is doing some money. You can do money with Open Source, and nobody complains that. Let me tell you a secret: it will be the better way to make money on software development, but that's on the future, so lets don't spoil the surprise.
I am not here to defend Mr Torvalds, as he doesn't need this kind of protection. He is not a priest on a crazy religion, even when it might look like it that sometimes. But you need some serious research before you keep saying things like this. Think of your career: you would like to think of yourself as a journalist, not a clown!
Hope my letter helps
The krenel is "just a component" of a Linux OS in the same way that the chassis and drivetrain are "just a component" of a car, technically true but a ridiculous oversimplification.
There is nothing special about the GNU components that live in Linux compared to other components that are needed to make a fully functional OS package you'd have a ridiculously long name. GNU isn't that special and would still be relegated to utter obscurity without Linux.
RMS should be happy that he lucked into getting his restrictive license adopted as the de-facto standard for open source software.
I assume you are living on this planet. DOS upgrades broke binary conpatibility with annoying regularity and so has Windows. If you've been paying attention at all, you will have noticed that Vista broke an entire generation of driver binaries simply because, in some things, it is not binary backward compatible for reasons of security. Oh yes, and some "improvements" to the beauty the author of this blog seems to like so much.
There isn't now and never has been a an OS, if one can even call DOS that without giggling, that has been 100% backward compatible no matter how hard the developers have tried.
However, I believe that the other misses the point entirely. Although several vendors are working hard to put Linux on the desktop, the real market for Linux is in production environments. I've spent much of my career as a Systems Administrator taking care of server farms, and I swear that the Win and Mac servers are just not up to the task. Give me a Linux server any day.
- by romanmir February 8, 2008 2:28 PM PST
- The number 0.67% does not look right.
- Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (56 Comments)http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9423084269.html - even by looking at some of the mobile devices where Linux kernel is used (probably with more GNU tools,) looking at some devices like these: http://dynamic.tivo.com/linux/linux.asp
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9515501295.html
and basically a multitude of devices with embedded (GNU)/Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_Linux
IBM is a large firm, it serves plenty of customers with its GNU/Linux offerings http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ and it is not the only company that does so, check out cisco for example. Google is certainly using GNU/Linux on its hundreds of thousands of servers. Most companies that have servers use GNU/Linux in one form or another, as firewalls, email servers, application servers etc.
On the desktop some distros became quite popular, everyone around me and their parents use Ubuntu. In any case 0.67 definitely seems to be a misrepresentation.
Certainly companies like SCO wouldn't feel as threatened by GNU/Linux if its use was under 1%, but they do feel threatened enough to engage into ridiculous wars with this Free Source OS.
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040923045054130
Cheers.