“In the last year or so, Linux has been embraced by a large
number of established companies. You consider this a good thing, a
bad thing? Are you happy? Sad?“Linus: I don’t care. I used to be a lot more
worried about it. A long time ago I used to be worried about
companies having their own (garbled) about doing this stuff. And
that hasn’t been so in a long time. Companies now have two reasons
to come in and embrace Linux. One is the lost penguin.“(Laughter.)
“But the other reason, more common, is just because they see a
cheap development model that actually works. There is both a cheap
part and an actually-works part. That’s something a lot of these
companies haven’t seen before. I find it hilarious how some of
these companies, big companies, are afraid to muck with the model
too much. You have companies with two and three letters that
actually require their employees to (learn) open source tact–a
series of lessons on what to do and what not to do. Which is, I
mean, completely strange but kind of encouraging in the sense that
other companies coming in do seem to realize that if they want to
get something out of it, they need to work with the program and not
against it…”