Brief Description: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel
Further Details:
Already named in 2004 one of the most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, Linus Torvalds also won one of this year's prestigious Innovations Awards, organized by The Economist.
When asked recently what makes him believe Linux will continue to gain momentum, Torvalds replied: "I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things," continuing:
"I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge."
Linux, he feels - and open source software in general - has history on its side.
When asked in August 2004 by BusinessWeek whether as leader of what BW called the Linux movement he was a "benevolent dictator" or not, Torvalds was refreshingly honest.
"I am a dictator," he conceded. "But it's the right kind of dictatorship."
The award, from The Economist magazine, was presented to Torvalds at a ceremony in San Francisco. His innovation award, for Linux, was in the Computing category.
Here is the citation in full, which in its rather dry form is more or less a History of Linux in a Nutshell:
"Computing, Linux: Linus Torvalds, Fellow, Open Source Development Lab. Torvalds originated Linux in 1991 as a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dissatisfied with the MS-DOS (and early Windows) operating system standard prevalent on PCs, Torvalds made Linux freely available for downloading, releasing the source code so that people with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own needs. The software created a huge following, eventually attracting big industry players such as Oracle, IBM, Intel, Netscape and others. It also spawned several new software companies, including Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux. Today, there are hundreds of millions of copies of Linux running on servers, desktop computers, network equipment and in embedded devices worldwide. With the support of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Torvalds now works exclusively on vendor-independent, neutral development of the Linux kernel."
About Jeremy Geelan Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, of the all-new Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, of the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo and founder of Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other major SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.
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