Torvalds: Linux not becoming obsolete would be ’sad’
Posted by: admin in Business and PoliticsI admire Linus Torvalds’ candor (this is the guy who freely admits his own family doesn’t use the Linux desktop, after all), as well as his foresight.
In an excellent interview posted on Simple-Talk, Torvalds covers a range of topics, including the Linux operating system’s place in history:
I have the ability to certainly envision the Linux kernel becoming obsolete–anything else would just be sad, really, in the massive picture.
He’s completely right. Much as we may pine for this or that project to reach market dominance, it is one of the cardinal virtues of open source that there are no legal or business policies that would entrench it as a monopoly. People may choose to use it for a long period of time and to the exclusion of other products/projects, but there are no nefarious designs in the code to make it so.
Hence, Linux may fade away. At some point, we should certainly hope so, in order to make way for the next phase of operating system, one that’s preferably open source.
Other interesting tidbits from the interview are Linus’ comment on patents:
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