Skepticum

LinuxWorld published an interview with Linus Torvald in which Torvald addresses the issue of commercial interest and open source software.

So I don’t think marketing can drive that [open source product]: if you have a purely marketing (or customer) driven approach, you end up with crap technology in the end. But I think that something that is purely driven by technical people will also end up as crap technology in the end, and you really need a balance here. So a lot of the really rabid “Free Software” people seem to often think that it’s all about the developers, and that commercial interests are evil. I think that’s just stupid. It’s not just about the individual developers; it’s about all the different kinds of interests all being able to work on things together.

Torvald very genuinely also explains why he wasn’t very worried about losing intellectual property when he released Linux:

Also, quite frankly, looking back, it wasn’t something that really is worth worrying about. First off, even if you’re the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it’s really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don’t worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They’ll probably not even know about your work, and they’ll certainly not think that it’s worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can’t really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught. So the very openness of the process actually protects the developer to a large degree.

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