TAG | The wit and wisdom of Linus Torvalds |
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| The Linux distillery - The Linux user and switcher blog | |
| by David M Williams | |
| Tuesday, 18 November 2008 | |
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Fast forward to today, and Linus now shares the secret to a life of adventure and fame: “If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system.” “Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it :)” “Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.” In the same vein as “Murphy’s Law” and the “Peter Principle,” Linus too has contributed to the greater good with one utterance now forever immortalised as “Linus’ Law.” Specifically, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” On the one hand, this is a pragmatic statement recognising the vast numbers of individuals poring over the Linux source code. On the other hand, it does demonstrate a truism. Linux benefits from the sheer numbers of developers worldwide who will find, and can often fix, faults in a fraction of the time an individual may achieve it. On personal philosophies, Linus reveals he is not a rabid open-source advocate. He’ll embrace closed source software – possibly on other platforms – provided it meets a need. Linus also demonstrates his penchant for automating repetitive tasks. “Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.” “Anybody who tells me I can’t use a program because it’s not open source, go suck on RMS. I’m not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that’s my choice, dammit.” Turn over for some more! |
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