Citas

He aquí una entrevista a Linus Torvalds, interesante y algo larga. Cito aquí los párrafos más interesantes:

"I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own. [...] In fact, when it comes to me personally, one of the things I worry about the most isn't even the technical issues, but making sure that the 'process' works, and that people can work well with each other".

(Sobre los parches de tiempo real) "I'm a big fan of low-latency work, but at the same time I'm pretty conservative, and I pushed back on some of the more aggressive merging, just because I want to make sure that it all makes sense for not just some extreme real time perspective, but also for 'normal' users who don't need it."

"I'm arrogant enough that I think we can easily compete against Solaris, and I actually think competition just tends to make people more motivated. So no, I'm not threatened at all."

"Actually, just yesterday we had a git performance issue, where ZFS was orders of magnitude slower than UFS for one user (not under Linux, but git is gaining a lot of traction even outside of kernel development). So I think a lot of the 'new file system' mania is partly fed by knowing about the issues with old filesystems, and then the (somewhat unrealistic) expectation that a 'new and improved' filesystem will make everything perfect."

"One thing that I'm personally more excited about than any of the filesystems you mention is actually the fact that Flash-based hard disks are quickly becoming available even for 'normal' users. Sure, they're still expensive (and fairly small), but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind."

"I like making strong statements, because I find the discussion interesting. In other words, I actually tend to 'like' arguing. Not mindlessly, but I certainly tend to prefer the discussion a bit more heated, and not just entirely platonic. And making strong arguments occasionally ends up resulting in a very valid rebuttal, and then I'll happily say: "Oh, ok, you're right."

"I think having multiple distros is an inevitable part of open source. And can it be confusing? Sure. Can it be inefficient? Yes. But I'd just like to compare it to politics: 'democracy' has all those confusing choices, and often none of the choices is necessarily what you 'really' want either, and sometimes you might feel like things would be smoother and more efficient if you didn't have to worry about the whole confusion of voting, different parties, coalitions, etc. But in the end, choice may be inefficient, but it's also what keeps everybody involved at least 'somewhat' honest. We all probably wish our politicians were more honest than they are, and we all probably wish that the different distros sometimes made other choices than they do, but without that choice, we'd be worse off."

Sobre la GPL3: "I think it is much improved over the early drafts, and I don't think it's a horrible licence. I just don't think it's the same kind of 'great' licence that the GPLv2 is. So in the absence of the GPLv2, I could see myself using the GPLv3. But since I have a better choice, why should I? That said, I try to always be pragmatic, and the fact that I think the GPLv3 is not as good a licence as the GPLv2 is not a 'black and white' question. It's a balancing act. And if there are other advantages to the GPLv3, maybe those other advantages would be big enough to tilt the balance in favour of the GPLv3.

"The only thing that I think can really ever displace the x86 architecture would come from below, i.e., if something makes us not use x86 as our main ISA in a decade, I think it would be ARM, thanks to the mobile device market."