Good Morning Silicon Valley: An Interview with Linus Torvalds

"Open source programs have clearly made some great advances in the past few years. We've seen it with Linux and Mozilla. What sort of future do you foresee for open source? What do you foresee happening to software vendors tied to proprietary software models?

"The power of open source really lies in various groups improving and building on an increasingly bigger existing base and slowly turning that base into commodity. One of the keywords here is 'slowly'--it's by its very nature pretty evolutionary, i.e. it takes time. It's, in my opinion, also pretty unstoppable, but the process definitely makes it possible for proprietary vendors to generally take advantage of the open source commodity base, and continue to be proprietary 'on top' of that base..."

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