“‘There’s a lot of power in combining the notion of having open
source and having traditional proprietary software and letting
everybody live the way they want to live,’ Torvalds said during a
panel discussion yesterday at the LinuxWorld Expo here.
‘Getting into whether you’re proprietary or not is a waste of
time.'”
“Speaking before an audience packed with open source advocates,
Torvalds said he releases all his Linux software as open source.
‘But at the same time, I enjoy working at a commercial company, and
the work I do is going to be very much a commercial software that
nobody plays around with,’ he said. Torvalds is an employee at
Transmeta, a highly secretive Silicon Valley company.’
“However, not everyone on the panel concurred with Torvalds’
acceptance of proprietary technology. In particular, Richard
Stallman, founder of the GNU effort to create a free version of
Unix–free in the sense of being unshackled by proprietary
restraints. Stallman also is founder of the Free Software
Foundation.”