Entrevista

Entrevista a Linus Torvalds:

"People need social rules. The same is true of projects. And you need some rules that can be enforced, so that people know up-front what they are getting themselves into. And note how I'm not saying that the BSD license is bad, or that putting something into the public domain (which is even more of a free-for-all) is bad. If it was what Hipp [autor de sqlite que puso su software bajo "public domain"] wanted for his code, then it was the right choice. So I think that anarchy is certainly ‘more free’ than having rules, but it is also pretty certainly also less productive, and I think that at least a certain class of programmers are going to be less interested in the project exactly because they don't see the rules in place to protect their work.

So not everybody likes the GPL, but a lot of people like it exactly because it puts certain safeguards in place. Are they the safeguards you would want? That will have to be your personal choice before you join a project that uses that license, but we can certainly look back and say that they seem to be conducive to productivity and success of the project."

(...)

"When it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be "overly technical" - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu."