Linus Torvalds the pragmatist

There is a very telling sequence in the documentary Revolution OS. Stallman is “thanking” the audience for the first “Linus Torvalds Award”, and he delivers one of his clever lines: it’s “like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Alliance.”

This whole controversy is a waste of energy.

Stallman has insisted on talking about “GNU plus Linux”. I think it’s better to say Linux plus GNU, the same way we can say Linux plus Apache; we even have the famous acronym: LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP).

The truth is that this discussion is somewhat byzantine, although very revealing. There is a divide, a deep one. When you keep reading the thread on the linux kernel list, you run into another one of those blunt Torvalds replies. For Linus this is an almost epistemological discussion: to him the FSF people hold a religious position, but he wants to do science.

Date Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:00:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds <> Subject Re: GPLv3 Position Statement

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

If by operating system you mean the surrounding userland application, then yes, why should there be a problem with a GPL2 kernel and a GPL3 userland? After all, the userland is not only GPL, but also BSD and other stuff.

Indeed. We have no trouble at all running programs with much worse licenses than the GPLv3 (ie commercial programs). There is no problem with user space being v3.