Goodness. Linus is crass, maybe even insulting at times.

Please, oh please, next time tell us something we _didn't_ know?

Personally, I am thrilled that Linus is an utterly independent human being, completely unbeholden to anyone, free to speak as he wishes about anyone at any time.

It would be nice to be so free, ne?

"Linus Torvalds - the creator of Linus"

The chicken and the egg debate is over. God created himself. Nice! ;-)

I've seen way too many tech gadget commentators (looking at you Don R.) who cover themselves with ridicule by not knowing what goes into an OS and blaming ChucklesTorvalds for some KDE desktop widget which wasnt working

As for Chuckles, what can you say? I dont know one person in my FLOSS project who is an unabashed fan. We all respect what he has done and does but our relationship to him isnt the same as Macbois have towards St.Stephen and even Windows dhimmi with Mary Gates son Bill.
If something were to happen to Linus, I truly believe that the Linux community is the best prepared. His role in the kernel while important is only part of the whole ecosystem of different projects that are so of shepherd by distros, picking and choosing various operating systems, desktop environments, compositing window managers and so on.

So I wouldnt call him a god, he is in the christian tradition playing the role of Joseph. Mark Shuttleworth, Jono Bacon, Richard Stallman, Jim Zemlin, Miguel de Icaza, Aaron Siego all have more direct roles to the user mass.

Torvalds is the geek who is locked away in his dungeaon lab working, not opening shopping malls and kissing babies.

I've used all the BSDs, Open Solaris and such and honestly I like some things and less some others, just like the Linux Kernel but I joined in further downstream development of Gnu-Linux distros because of the carry over benefits the GPL license gave our company.

I think his choice of licenses at that point in time was his most brilliant move.

Bobby E.

wouldn't that be amazing though? Frankly I'm still amazed to this day he didn't actually call it the Linus OS (or may he did at one point and some English speaker heard Linux and that was the end ...).

Thanks for pointing out the (now corrected) typo!!

bobby boy, leave mary alone now.

Ouch - that's all I can say.

Well the comment confirm that Linus never really looked into OpenBSD. Judging the whole project by few vocal whiners isn't really constructive.

I have to remind that OpenBSD folks contribute enormously - and not only on security front. From many projects, recent bright spot is OpenNTPD which rather simple (and most importantly reliably working!!!) NTPD protocol implementation.

There is more to OpenBSD than security. Theo is quite pragmatical guy and steers projects away from political games, trying to concentrate people and what can be done now and what needs to be improved in future. Not much different from other projects.

P.S. Disclaimer: long-term Linux developer/user.

It is refreshing to still have some real humans among us, who do not need to carefully avoid corporate interests when it comes to expressing a personal opinion. The open source community needs to be told the straight truth from time to time, and personally I would not be offended if he would have used the same words to criticize my own work. Actually, I would have fun imagining myself being part of a group of masturbating monkeys. :-)

While we should try to talk friendly to users, a bit of humor and stronger expressions are the urgently needed salt'n peppa in a decent conversation between developers.

Greetings,
Chris

It's especially funny if you are an OpenBSD developer. since he is explicitly supporting the long time position of OpenBSD that all bugs are important. e.g. fixing that 30 year old YACC bug the other day. We're thinking of getting t-shirts made up.

For your follow-up article, why not write: "What Theo de Raadt thinks about Linux", complete with a juicy "Greatest Hits" collection featuring his career of insults, rants and hypocritical finger-pointing? Now there's some good reading. :)

Well he does have a point, i work for a security company who deal with UK government, and they spend hours on the support lines picking holes in CESG and our security, yet 90% don't have an effective backup policy in place. the bigger picture is better sometimes

lol! Linus is the best. even when he criticizes things that I use and love ... somehow, it's okay. Cause he's Linus :P

I'd wish the BSD developers would stand on their golden pedestal like Linus and complain on what complete shit Linux is.

As sensational as that quote is, I think you're focusing on the wrong part of what Linus said. The issue of transparency with respect to security was dominant in the context of that thread. As the grsecurity guy wrote, he's hardly alone in his concern than Linus and his security team are too silent about the nature of things they're fixing. He pointed to comments from others, including 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau, about the improprieties of silence.

For Linus to equate security issues with more trivial "glitches" is a bit more sensational and disturbing. And it *should* concern Linux and open source advocates who mention "openness" as a selling feature for open source adoption, especially when they mention it in relation to security issues in Windows.

As far as how OpenBSD operates, their focus on the clarity (as a matter of form) of their code has led them to discover "trivial" bugs *and* improve security. Their openness about both trivial and serious issues has led to improvements in how other operating systems, including Linux, handle those things.

Time for everyone to cut the double standards. That includes Linus. If "secrecy" and non-disclosure about patches is so bad for Microsoft, why is it good for Linux?

You aren't really initiated into the software world until you've been ranted on by Theo. Sometimes I think he's just frustrated with things in general. But I pay close attention to what he says.

I could care less about what Linus says. Bill Gates? I'd listen to him too, but for different reasons.

I bet Linus uses SSH and doesn't like holes in it.

Oh, FFS get a life. Linus is just expressing his opinion, he's not "rude" or "incredibly crass". 7-year old kids say worse things to each other! What a load of hot air about nothing!
He'll be down the pub having a beer with the BSD guys next week :')