
The Legacy of Linus Torvalds - nealabq
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/linus-torvalds-isoc/all/
======
ehhhokfine
I don't agree with RMS on everything, but it irks me to no end that Torvalds
has criticized the free software movement as "Driven by hate" while everyone
admires how unconventional and flame-happy Torvalds is. It's not as if his
flames are more noble or more entertaining than RMS's, it's a pure double
standard and pure bias.

Free software advocates often hate Microsoft, for their endless corruption. So
does the co-founder of OSI. Torvalds hates corruption of other organizations--
what's the difference?

~~~
zem
not to necessarily excuse torvalds, but one big difference is that his rants
are a lot less ideological than stallman's. to a first approximation, linus
rants against people he feels are being stupid, whereas rms rants against
people he feels are being evil.

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RyanZAG
Most interesting part of that article is Linus' view on the security industry
- haven't really heard much discussion on that from him before. I don't think
it's as bad as all that - most security researchers are pretty good at
contacting companies first to fix bugs before going along with the whole
conference thing. At the heart of it he's right though, the whole IT security
industry is basically just about profiting off the mistakes made by coders.
That's pretty different from the real world security industry where you take
something and actually secure it, rather than patching up the mistakes of
others and claiming credit...

~~~
jiggy2011
It is probably a good thing that the US has a strong security community,
especially since they write a good chunk of the software that takes up most of
the CPU time.

The other option would be government funded hackers in places like China
finding security holes in US made software and ensuring they remain
undisclosed (to anyone outside Chinese govt) to maintain an advantage.

Not meaning to pick on China in particular here, would it be any better if the
US govt was the only ones to know this stuff?

~~~
mtgx
Do you think NSA and CIA doesn't do the same? They even buy zero day exploits
from hackers so they can use them themselves against other countries. How do
you think they made Flame work? And these guys are "Government sponsored
hackers" too. In fact they are even hiring for this right now.

~~~
jiggy2011
That's sort of my point. If there isn't aren't independent security
researchers who make a stink about security issues thus causing them to be
fixed then these government organisations will be the only ones with
knowledge.

~~~
rhizome
How do you propose independent security researchers compete with governments
on a resource basis?

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rohern
Come on, come on, come on. Not to be an rms clone, but Linus Torvalds did not
create Linux in the sense that this article implies.

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jscipione
"And after Torvalds had installed the 16 floppy drives that comprised the
Minix operating system..."

I think the article meant 16 floppy disks, installing 16 floppy drives would
be quite a feat!

~~~
archangel_one
Indeed - I remember hearing about someone setting up a 5-disk RAID set of
floppy drives, but 16 seems a little excessive :)

~~~
rwmj
That would be USB. The floppy controller on AT-era PCs I'm pretty sure would
only support 2 drives.

ObStory:

Minix + floppy drives taught me a valuable lesson about compression. In Minix
there was a very useful command called "vol" which let you split the input
over many floppy disk "volumes", eg:

    
    
        <some huge input> | vol -w 360 /dev/fd0
    

would split the input, prompting you to change the floppy between each 360
kilobyte disk.

I chose this command to back up my Minix system:

    
    
        tar cf - / | compress | vol -w 360 /dev/fd0
    

Unfortunately when I came to read it back, I found that floppy disk #5 (of
about 15) had a bad sector, rendering the entire remainder of the backup
useless.

~~~
martinced
Way before I got into PC / Linux I was into C64 and Amiga piracy as a kid.
When we had stuff that needed more than two or three disks we'd use additional
disks as a redundancy method. I don't remember all the redundancy details but
basically if you have one additional disk you could have any one of the disk
fully failing and you'd still be able to get back your data.

I'm pretty sure that there was a command-line to do the same ; )

~~~
gosub
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