In an interview with Computerworld, Linus Torvalds talks about many things – the early days of Linux, his motivations for writing the operating system and Microsoft’s recent claims that some free software and e-mail programs violate 235 of its patents.
Of the latter Torvalds says: “I personally think it’s mainly another shot in the FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] war. MS has a really hard time competing on technical merit, and they traditionally have instead tried to compete on price, but that obviously doesn’t work either, not against open source. So they’ll continue to bundle packages and live off the inertia of the marketplace, but they want to feed that inertia with FUD.”
Interestingly, too. Tovalds says that the whole reason he released Linux was just to get some feedback on his work. Little did he realize then the revolution that act would set off. Microsoft, however, may be the better for having this competition. The company has, historically, always been at its best when it has had market pressure to work against. It may not invent the hottest technology but it certainly creates influential products once it has a competitor in its target.
