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silicon.com readers unleashed on Linus Torvalds
We asked you what you would ask Linus Torvalds, father of Linux, if you met him.

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 23 May 2001

Armed with your questions silicon.com then headed off for an exclusive interview with the man himself. You can watch a full video interview at http://www.silicon.com/a44469 but here are the highlights:

What are the likely directions for the kernel in the short and long term? (Alan Chandler)

Linus Torvalds: "In the short term we're just stabilising 2.4 and we won't even open up the development tree until some time this summer.

There are actually people already working on things that they want to submit to me when I open 2.5. Some of it is fixing up some of the infrastructure - especially for high end I/O. Also a lot of people are getting interested in Linux on truly big machines - so called NUMA machines where you have memories spread out over several machines and you want to see it as one, single image.

Will ASPs give Linux the big push? (Patrick Davies)

LT: "I think the ASP market has cooled off a lot lately. So I don't actually think that Application Service Providers are going to be that big a thing.

I think also the way people actually use computers it's not a 'for rent' kind of thing, you tend to want to have your own applications. So I think other things are going to drive Linux: the desktop and the traditional server market."

Should operating systems be invisible to the user? (Chris Allen)

LT: "I think that it's actually a fundamental flaw right now that people are so aware of what operating system they're using, and in a perfect world you should not care what kind of computer you have and what operating system you have. That's obviously not how it works right now, and it probably won't be how it works for quite some time to come.

But I'd be really surprised if people still discuss operating systems fifty years from now just because most people really don't want to know. It's a huge business and the operating system is a very powerful base, which means it becomes this political tool."

Should Microsoft be punished for anti-competitive behaviour? (Desmond McDonnell)
LT: "I'm kind of ambivalent on the issue. I have found it very interesting to see what happens if Microsoft gets split up - especially with the so-called Baby Bills approach where you split up Microsoft in equal parts instead of trying to split it up according to what they do.

At the same time, I'm not sure that going in and trying to split up Microsoft through legal measures is necessarily always a great idea. Some amount of fear of the law is probably a good idea, but I think Microsoft has been doing a number of good applications and I think they've been too aggressive in marketing them sometimes.

How can Linux be a serious competitor to Microsoft? (Faris Sipri)
LT: "I think Linux already is a serious competitor. And certainly in the server market. I suspect to some degree, Linux has already forced Microsoft to change some of their licensing and pricing tactics, simply because they've had a form of competition that they historically haven't had. Obviously Microsoft is very dominant on the desktop, but I don't see that as being forever.

It's a place where Linux does have a lot of advantages. Not just the technology, which is what I tend to focus on, but the fact that people get to play with it themselves tends to mean that you find innovations coming from individuals or small companies that couldn't really innovate using a Microsoft base or any proprietary base."

Did you ever think that Linux would become so popular? (Desmond McDonnell)
LT: "When I started this, it was a completely personal project. I thought I was going to be the only user. Everything happened very gradually. The only point I was surprised was when I no longer knew all the people using Linux. Going from a hundred to a thousand or ten thousand or a million, it was very natural and while I never expected it, I was also never surprised by it."

What is your source of inspiration for Linux? (Vijay Patel)
LT: "I didn't have any real source of inspiration. It was mainly just my own kind of needs - what I wanted my own machine to be. I certainly had the university environment very strongly in mind and that I wanted to bring that kind of environment to my own home machine. A lot of the inspiration though was really just getting to know the hardware really well and seeing what it could do. And that was what got me started. And that's still what makes it very interesting."

To watch the exclusive video interview with Linus Torvalds and to enter our readers' survey visit http://www.silicon.com/linusweek .