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| Linus Torvalds: "Linux Is Much Bigger Than Me!" ...continued from page 1 Q: Any suggestions on how this gap can be bridged? Can the Linux Foundation be the central body to facilitate such collaboration? Linus: I personally tend to believe more in the power of individuals than in any higher-level 'policies'. I think the LF has been a place where a number of companies come together and discuss their issues, and yes, I'm sure LF would be happy to mediate these kind of things too, but quite frankly, I think it's already happening. And it's happening not because of any high-level policy work, but because hardware companies are just getting more and more used to open source, and they just automatically end up having more contact between their hardware engineers and the open source groups. Q: What are the future enhancements/paths/plans for the Linux kernel? Linus: I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own. So I really don't have any great vision for what the kernel will look like in five years -- just a very general plan to make sure that we keep our eye on the ball. In fact, when it comes to me personally, one of the things I worry about the most isn't even the technical issues, but making sure that the 'process' works, and that people can work well with each other. Q: How do you see the relationship of Linux and Solaris evolving in the future? How will it benefit the users? Linus: I don't actually see a whole lot of overlap, except that I think Solaris will start using more of the Linux user space tools (which I obviously don't personally have a lot to do with -- I really only do the kernel). The Linux desktop is just so much better than what traditional Solaris has, and I expect Solaris to move more and more towards a more Linux-like model there. On the pure kernel side, the licensing differences mean that there's not much cooperation, but it will be very interesting to see if that will change. Sun has been making noises about licensing Solaris under the GPL (either v2 or v3), and if the licence differences go away, that could result in some interesting technology. But I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude to that. Q: You've always encouraged competition between kernel developers in the Linux kernel. My question is, do you feel threatened by Solaris, which is arguably the first real competitor in the FOSS community, as a rival to your own kernel? Linus: I'm arrogant enough that I think we can easily compete against Solaris, and I actually think competition just tends to make people more motivated. So no, I'm not threatened at all. Of course, one of the reasons I'm not threatened by competition is the fact that I simply don't have to |
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