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I've known Linus Torvalds, Linux's inventor, for over 20 years. We're not chums, but we like each other.Lately, Torvalds has been getting a lot of flack for his management style. Linus doesn't suffer fools gladly. He has one way of judging people in his business of developing the Linux kernel: How good is your code?Nothing else matters. As Torvalds said earlier this year at the Linux.conf.au Conference, "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel-that's what's important to me." Now, I can deal with that kind of person. If...

Sure there are technical forums that discuss btrfs, the shiny new filesystem for Linux but my experience has shown that FReepers meet or exceed the technical expertise anywhere on the net. The two cutting-edge filesystems that are (supposedly) impervious to bitrot are btrfs and zfs (which has a Linux implementation, older than what Oracle has now closed off).

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

In a lengthy email interview with TechCrunch's Scott Merrill, Linux creator Linus Torvalds allows that he's a bit baffled at how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the MacBook Air - even several years after the Air's first release. Torvalds pronounces the Air "special" and "ahead of its time", elaborating that he wants his office to be quiet, with the loudest thing in the room the occasional purring of the cat, and that when he travels, he wants to travel light, contending that a notebook weighing more than a kilo (2.2 lb.) is less than ideal,...

Apparently, Torvalds stepped into the arena and helped convince an ITC Administrative LAW Judge named Theodore R. Essex that Microsoft’s patent in question was invalid. The same judge who determined that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents, including one known simply as the 352 patent. That particular patent has to do with storing filenames with a lot of characters in old file systems like Windows FAT. Torvalds told the judge that Motorola had found the posting he had made about long filenames used in a compatible manner with short filenames, and that post predated the Microsoft patent by three years....

Long before the leading Linux desktop environment GNOME arrived in a 3.0 version in April, long-time GNOME users have been grumbling about the radical changes. The dissatisfaction only increased since GNOME 3.0's debut in the beta of Fedora 15 and continued with the Fedora 15 final. We mention Fedora because no other major Linux distro has yet to make the switch. To avoid it, Canonical gambled on its own controversial Unity UI layer in Ubuntu 11.04, and the Ubuntu-flavored Linux Mint 11 opted for the earlier GNOME 2.32.1. Now Linux creator and kernel overseer Linus Torvalds (pictured), has stepped in...

Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

In the latest word in a peculiarly public interchange, Linux leader Linus Torvalds appears inclined to take up Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz on his offer for dinner. Last weekend, Torvalds expressed some "cynical" thoughts about Sun's intentions regarding its open-source Solaris operating system, which in turn led Schwartz to invite Torvalds to dinner to demonstrate Sun's intention of being a team player in the open-source realm, not a parasite. In an interview Wednesday, Torvalds indicated he was interested in the dinner date, even given the condition Schwartz attached. "I'm a fervent (believer and founding member) of the Free...

Linus Torvalds has hit back at Microsoft's claims that it holds 42 patents that are infringed by the Linux kernel. Torvalds, the leader of the project to create the Linux kernel, was contemptuous of Microsoft's claims and has asked Redmond to name the infringements so that their veracity can be challenged and workarounds found. "Naming them would either make it clear that Linux is not infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim," he said in an email exchange...

That Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, prefers the current version of the General Public License, GPLv2, over the version in development, GPLv3, is no secret. But in a lengthy E-mail response to questions from InformationWeek, he offers a full explanation of what he thinks is superior about GPLv2. Torvalds says he regrets that the authors of GPLv3 have decided to take aim at political opponents. He has little patience for statements about the "evil and immoral" nature of proprietary code or the "TiVo-ization" of Linux (a reference to set-top box producer TiVo producing a device that runs...

On Friday Several kernel developers issued a position paper criticizing the GPLv3 drafts. That prompted Software Freedom Law Center (SLFC) chairman Eben Moglen to issue a "renewed invitation" yesterday to kernel developers to participate in the GPLv3 process. Linus Torvalds responded to Moglen's statement by saying that his position on the license is clear and that he's "fed up" with the FSF.

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

   http://www.news.com/ Torvalds, who initially created Linux for the Intel x86 platform, revealed to the Linux Kernel Mailing List in February during a discussion on kernel size reduction that his main desktop machine no longer featured an x86 processor. Hence, Torvalds said, a patch specific to the x86 platform that he was submitting to the list for consideration was totally untested. ZDNet Australia was intrigued by this remark and sought to question Torvalds on why the man who helped revolutionize the use of Unix on the x86 platform would move away from it, and where he had moved to....

SCO seals deal for legal expense cap Published: November 5, 2004, 10:30 AM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday. The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat. SCO's stock...

The originator of the Linux OS has sharp words for SCO's "cornered rat" claims of intellectual-property infringement If anyone knows what's in Linux, it's Linus Torvalds. He did the first work on the open-source operating system while a student at the University of Helsinki, and he managed the often chaotic process of building it with other programmers. Now, SCO Group (SCOX), a small Utah software company, claims Linux is trampling on intellectual property rights it inherited from Novell (NOVL), which got them from AT&T (T). In an e-mail interview with BusinessWeek Correspondent Jim Kerstetter, Torvalds explains why he thinks SCO...

Waltham, Mass. -- Linus Torvalds won't render his own verdict on SCO Group's legal case against IBM until the Unix code in question is revealed in court. In an e-mail response to CRN, Torvalds, widely considered the father of Linux, said he is awaiting judgment until SCO identifies the Unix code IBM allegedly misappropriated and handed over to the open-source community. But at this point, he said he's skeptical the case has merit. "SCO isn't even telling what they have, and I'm not a lawyer anyway," Torvalds wrote. "The people I've spoken to seem to think the merit of the...