Sunday, August 19, 2007

Linus and Linux: Sycophantic Hero Worship

I must admit to getting really fed up with the Linux community lately.

They seem to believe that their hero, Linus Torvalds, can do nothing wrong.

In a recent post on slashdot I said this:
For anyone who can't think for themselves, yes, his opinion really counts.

I, personally, like to form my own opinions of things. While Linux has been seized upon by people as a great operating system. The only good thing about it is that it's free.

Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture which, as many operating systems experts will tell you, has number of problems.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that he's some kind of visionary, when he's not. The man never says anything positive about anyone else's work. I find it really tiring to listen to him rail on everything under the sun... speaking of Sun. Linus railed against them for not giving anything to the community.... let's examine that assertion for a minute:

Sun has:
1) Given it's OS out under a Free Software license
2) Given it's Processor out under the GPL
3) Released Open Office under the GPL
4) Is in the process of releasing Java under the GPL.

What else would you like them to give? Does he want them to drop Solaris and start being a Linux distributor?

Linus poo-poo's CVS and SVN as being "good enough." While I agree that CVS certainly does suck, SVN is not a the piece of crap he thinks it us.

He regularly criticizes RMS. I don't agree with everything RMS says, but some of the things that Linus dings him on are completely assinine. The GPLv2 was created before certain technologies existed. The GPLv3 was made to address the problems these new technologies present... and keeps with the spirit of the GPLv2. Linus is too blind to see this.

Don't kid yourself... he's no one's hero. He's just started to believe his own press.

Good day.

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