Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 22nd Aug 2007 17:52 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
"The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges."
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Member since:
2006-03-31
"Not only that, but saying that software has freedoms just like people demeans the whole idea of what freedom is."
Thank you for your historical notes. I very much appreciate them. However I disagree with your assumption that free software is trivial compared to other issues facing the world. Initially I agreed with you, but here is a counter-example:
A friend has been working on a program that does protein interaction and gene expression analysis to determine the characteristics of breast cancer. This program requires computational statistics. Matlab provided the required routines to do the calculations, but the program needs to be able to run on computers without Matlab installed. The friend looked at the source code of R, figured out how the calculations were done, and included them in her program.
In this case, free AND open source software benefited science; perhaps in the future it might improve the lives of others. That's a clear-cut example.
EDIT: I improved the explanation of the example.
Edited 2007-08-23 03:43