Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open-source operating system, has some strong views about the legal dispute between The SCO Group and IBM, which he shared with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli in an e-mail exchange last week. Torvalds also last week announced he was taking a leave of absence from Transmeta Corp. and becoming the first full-time fellow at the Open Source Development Lab, where he will continue to drive the next version of the Linux kernel, 2.6, due later this summer.
Do you expect anything to change now that you are working for the OSDL in terms of your focus around Linux?
I don"t foresee any particular changes. That said, I remember when I first joined Transmeta, and some issues Transmeta ended up having with SMP ended up being how I started getting into Linux SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] development—not because Transmeta asked me to per se, but because the situation was just different enough from my situation in Helsinki that my priorities shifted. In other words, we"re all creatures of our environment, and in that sense any change will obviously reflect some way in what I do.