[Tech] Wired intervista Linus Torvalds

At 21, wearing a ratty robe in a darkened room in his mother's Helsinki apartment, Torvalds wrote the kernel of an operating system that can now be found inside a boggling array of machines and devices.

He posted it on the Internet and invited other programmers to improve it.

Since then, tens of thousands of them have, making Linux perhaps the single largest collaborative project in the planet's history.



Twelve years on, the operating system is robust enough to run the world's most powerful supercomputers yet sleek and versatile enough to run inside consumer toys like TiVo, as well as television set-top boxes and portable devices such as cell phones and handhelds.

But even more impressive than Linux's increasing prevalence in living rooms and pockets is its growth in the market for servers, the centralized computers that power the Internet and corporate networks.



It's only a matter of time, concluded Goldman Sachs in a study released earlier this year titled "Fear the Penguin," before Linux displaces Unix as the dominant operating system running the world's largest corporate data centers.

It's impossible to measure precisely the spread of software that anyone - from a resident of a third world country to the CTO of a multinational giant - can download for free over the Internet, but Linux has surely proved itself the most revolutionary software undertaking of the past decade.

Link: testo completo dell'intervista su Wired Magazine.