Why is Linux so "selfish"?

"If I had really known the difficulty of building an operating system from scratch, I wouldn't have had the guts to do it." "August 25, 1991, with Linus Torvalds (Linus Torvalds) This" naïve "description, the Linux system formally met with the world. 25-year-old Linux, its open source is derived from the "selfish". But selfish, but he was chased for 25 years, but also by the "tough" kidnapping to other devices, very hateful to send it into space!

Said is "Naïve", is not derogatory, but from now on, the Linus Torvalds really too naïve underestimated this oneself after school to make things.

Because of the gradual expansion of Linux in the subsequent development, the scope of the small to the palm of the device, large to explore the universe, far from what he had imagined the broad.

Linux for personal use

If you love to say that Linux is a "selfish" purpose of the birth of the product, presumably many people will first scoff. But in fact, at the beginning of the birth of Linux, really just to meet individual needs.

Linus Torvalds, who was only 22 years old, studied computers at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In his study, in order to facilitate access to the University of Unix server, for his own device conveniently wrote a program, but until the program was written almost, Linus found that he wrote an operating system kernel. In an interview later in the IEEE Spectrum, Linus confessed that the year's own really is dictionary:

If I had really known the difficulty of building an operating system from scratch, I would certainly not have the courage to do it.

This young ignorance also let me from the beginning did not follow the old way programming kernel. However, the "selfish purpose" that love has to say does not mean that Linus needs to develop this for himself, but rather refers to the open source of Linux.

Selfish open-source

Known as Linux is an open source system (although not all Linux distributions are open source), and the success of Linux is largely dependent on the open source community to provide it with a steady stream of code support, so that from the year a person's "small project" growing up. The reason that Linux technology can obtain these resources, in fact, rely on the Linux licensing protocol--GPL.

GPL full name GNU General Public License Agreement (License), one of the terms of the Free Software license agreement, the biggest feature of the agreement (and the biggest criticism) is that any derivative works using the GPL program will be under the GPL. In short, any program that uses the GPL program code needs to open the code with the GPL, and one code can cause countless programs to become GPL and continue to spread.

Because of this feature the GPL has been evaluated for "infectious Diseases", and many companies have resented the agreement. For example, Microsoft's predecessor, Mr. Ballmer, publicly evaluated the use of the GPL's "cancer" in 2001, the root cause of which was the GPL agreement. This is because the Linux kernel released under the GPL will need to return the code back to the open source community with a re-development project involving GPL code.

In addition to Microsoft, many enterprises and companies, especially hardware manufacturers are also very headache to the Linux GPL, because of the open source drive, for business secrecy and other reasons, when providing support is very careful, even passive response. For example, Nvidia has not been able to provide Linux with the latest technology driver support, and has directly indicated that it will not be like Linux and other OS level support, because this will keep the company's confidential technical information exposed to everyone. For this phenomenon, Linux's father Linus in a Finnish interview directly with "international gestures" "selfish" Linux "selfish" Linux response, and said that Nvidia is his life in the work of the "worst failure" dealt with.

Linus may have been expected for the criticism of Linux open source. In an interview with the BBC, Linus that the real feature of open source is that everyone can be "selfish". Open source is not hypocritical "let's sing around the campfire and make the world a better place". If everyone can contribute to their "selfish" reasons, open source can succeed.

Linus, for example, loves programming and wants to learn how to control the hardware, which is his "selfish" purpose. The "selfishness" here does not refer to the return of benefits, and many people have this idea, fearing that their efforts will be used in vain by others. So Linus use GPLV2 license to solve this problem, this kind of similar "a newspaper" model, while enjoying the results of others, but also promised to return the results.

Linus that the GPL is a fair license. Connected to the future of the road ahead, the extent to which Linux can develop to today is definitely not the Linus of the year. In the mobile phone, in the router, in the server cloud, in the stock Exchange Hall, even the space satellite has a Linux figure. Linux is used in different forms in different industries, different fields.

The "selfish" application domain

In the future, Linux will be more powerful and professional, in addition to more areas of application. According to data published by the Linux Foundation, more and more enterprise developers are contributing code. According to the latest data, volunteers contributed as low as 7.7% of the code, the rest of the code is contributed by the enterprise developers, of which Intel occupies the first list of 12.9%.

But when someone asks Linus what the future of Linux technology will be like, Linus doesn't seem to want to think too far. Linus said that thinking about the future, let the visionaries think about it, he just want to be a practical programmer, try to "can do the best effect."

Employment.

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Why is Linux so "selfish"?