“Moderator: What do you see as the big
issue with respect to the internalization of Linux?
Torvalds: What is fascinating about the
international side of Linux is that I’ve met a lot of people
outside of the U.S. who are just doing their own thing and not just
translating U.S.-based programs for their own locale. All these
people can make their own decisions, and that’s more important than
IBM selling 15,000 terminals in Japan.”
“Moderator: What are the potential legal
conflicts using GPLs in other countries?
Torvalds: It’s not that the GPL isn’t
understood; it’s the notion of copyright. Most legal problems here
in the U.S. have to do with intellectual property law in general —
nothing like that would happen anywhere else in the world. Outside
of the U.S, people don’t care about copyright, and not because
they’re evil, but because they can’t afford to.”
“Audience question: With so many Linux
distributions out there, isn’t that eventually going to cause
fragmentation?
Torvalds: We’ll certainly see fragmentation.
You’ll see people interested in high-end and they’ll fragment off
from people doing stuff for the PDA. The two will never really
meet. They will use different tools, but there will be patterns
that apply to both. Diversification is fine. The problem is when
you get in-fighting — that is, when you use your tools to destroy
the other — that’s the problem and that’s what happened with Unix.
The open source community is slightly different than that.”