SoftPanorama.org: Portraits of Open Source Pioneers Redux

Richard Stallman:
“The problem was that he does not understood Unix very well. But he
wanted software, and especially ideas of how to improve is to be
shared freely among programmers. It is easy to discard this ideas
as utopian and Anarchistic, and there are definitly stong overtones
of Anarchist ideology in the free software movement. But as people
in the former USSR realized, socialism is not about choice — it is
about denying choice in the name of equality. RMS position is
somewhere in between position of a “proletarian revolutionary” and
a honest position of an academic scholar (in best Renaissance
tradition) — a scholar unaffected by the wave of software
commercialization of late 70th, that produced companies like
Microsoft, Borland, Lotus and Novell.”

Linus Torvalds:
“I do not buy the idea that Linus Torvalds started developing the
kernel for personal use and “for the fun of it”. Usual “vanity
fair” motives probably were prominent as well, otherwise the
project would had been ended before version 1.0 ;-). But, anyway,
for a student with just one year experience in C and a simple
terminal emulator as the only (semi) completed project, it was a
very bold move.”

“…I think that it’s simply funny when Linus Torvalds call this
process of rewriting existing kernel “inventing Linux”. I would
partially agree that Unix was invented (C language was a pretty
original blend of BCPL and PL/1; several key ideas like
hierarchical filesystem, pipes and regular expressions were not
present in Multix which was a prototype for Unix). But Linux was a
plain vanilla reengineering project. And if Linus Torvalds can be
called a revolutionary, he is a political not technical
revolutionary similar to Newt Gingrich, the author of the “Contract
with America” thing (fight corruption, waste in government
spendins, tax reform and a balanced budget, etc.). In no way Linux
can be called a technological advance: classic monolithic kernel+C
as implementation language means that Linux is based upon CS
orthodoxy and as such is less innovative than, say, Plan 9 or Be
OS, or Amiga. This neo-conservative orthodoxy of Linux zealots —
the fundamental resistance to anything non-traditional or, god
forbid, developed by Microsoft, makes Linux success really a
neo-conservative type of success. Although it serves as an
alternative to Microsoft OSes, Linux really inhibits grows of
alternative OSes like Be OS, and thus contributes to the lack of
diversity, and ultimately lack of innovation in operating system
market.”

Complete
Story