I met Linus at the Linux BOF at the 1994 Boston USENIX. Very ironically, I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD. It sounds like a cheap shot, but please hear me out:<p>I was sysadmin'ing a university stats department at the time, and NFS use was very important. I had been trying to use Linux on 486's, but performance of xdvi (with NFS mounted fonts) was abysmal. A 486 would take minutes to render the same page that a wimpy DECStation could render in a second. From tcpdump, I figured out it was because Linux did not do any sort of NFS caching at the time, and xdvi wandered around font files one byte at a time.<p>I asked Linus at the BOF when they planned to implement NFS. He told me NFS was unimportant, nobody used it, and so on.<p>I then attended the FreeBSD BOF where a clean shaven guy in a collared shirt was giving a power point presentation. I asked about NFS there, and was told it should work fine. When I got home from the conference, I switched the 486 to FreeBSD, and it worked just fine.<p>I eventually did OS research on FreeBSD, was one of a few people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha, and I now do kernel performance work for a large CDN, where we run FreeBSD.
Say what you want about RMS, he never sold out and stood on his principles. And his cause is noble. I might not agree with his methods 100% of the time, but I respect this man.<p>And another thing: he was right about many "controversial" things, and was ahead of his time.<p>I really think that him asking people to call the software GNU/Linux isn't that much to ask.<p>Seriously, once you understand the amount of work GNU has done.. and it's all open and free.
Linus keynoted last month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit Shanghai, if you want to compare his views after 20 years. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM2Njj5PvNc4Mtcril2YyR95d" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM...</a><p>(Those baby daughters on the stage in 1999 are in college now.)
> The open source movement focuses on practical advantages that you can get by having a community of users who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software. (Stallman)<p>...<p>> Freedom to cooperate with other people, freedom to have a community, is important for our quality of life, is important for having a good society that we can live in. And that is, in my view, more important than having powerful and reliable software. (Stallman)
I was there. Man, how things have changed. I'll never forget the feeling of getting Linux booted on my old 386 the day Linus posted about it to the minix-list .. what a rocket-ride its been!
"Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Fleet"<p>RMS always had the best sense of humor.
Wow near the end when Linus takes his daughters on stage in the middle of RMS' speech. That's next level. Probably not scripted but it comes off as so undermining.