Nobel Peace Prize to Linus Torvalds: A Northwest Nobel option?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 01:16:29PM -0500, William Muriithi wrote:
> Its very hard to be very influential without making enemies. In fact,
> I think its impossible.

RMS has accomplished a lot.  Much of it good.  I think some of what he
seems to want to accomplish would not necesarily be good though.  He can
be too extreme.

> The problem with Linus is we may not even have know him if Stallman
> had not created the environment that supported him. You may say BSD
> would have cut it, but I really doubt that. If Linux was BSD licensed,
> it would not have grown as fast as it did. And, it would not even have
> the competitive advantage over the current BSD licensed OS any way.

Well we will never know.  gcc was certainly a big help at the time.
Of course we may have been much better off had gcc not been around and
a good compiler developed instead.  Someone might even have started
writing the needed tools if they were no around, or used some of the
BSD licensed ones.

> Another thing going for Stallman, is not only did his work create an
> OS, he also proved that copy left was viable. That has resulted to
> other cool things like wikipedia, open street you name it. I frankly
> believe that mindset would not have been been well entrenched without
> GPL

The GPLv2 does seem to have acomplished that.  I am not sure the GPLv3
would have been that successful at it.  I get the impression Linus would
not have chosen the GPL if v3 had been what it was at the time.  He did
write a license himself initially, then decided to change to the GPLv2
instead.

> This is one man the world should be grateful about!

That I will give you.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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