Torvalds: 'I Was Wrong About Apple'


Founder of the Linux open-source movement, Linus Torvalds, has confessed: he was wrong in predicting the demise of Apple Computer.

In a TechCentral interview, Torvalds also says he likes Mac hardware - but not the core of OS X, which he regards as closed.

"They made the base of the house open source, but all the rest of the stuff, the wiring, is their own stuff. I don't want that to happen with Linux," Torvalds says in the article. As he has previously said in public, Torvalds dislikes the Mach microkernel employed by Apple in OS X, adding "I think they made a lot of bad design choices".

In the story, Torvalds also expresses his dislike of Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors, arguing its performance is poor. He prefers AMD's approach, as they move from a 32-bit to a 64-bit Athlon.

Torvalds was interviewed about the next version of Linux, which should be released by the end of the second quarter of 2003, which is provisionally titled version 2.6.

Analysis: Buy a Linux PC. At 2GHz, the only sound you can hear is the sound of the developer whining.

Linux may have the enterprise server market all over XServe right now, but OS X's desktop user base is likely to continue to grow faster than Linux-based desktops market share. But in some respects, OS X links up with at least some of the Linux developer community: they can work on Darwin open-source projects as well as Linux, if they choose, meaning that, ultimately, a lot of apps developed for Linux should find their way over to OS X. Consider this quotation from iDevGames:

"Tomorrow I will get on a plane. I'll have my PowerBook with me. On that flight, I can write Cocoa apps, PHP-based web sites, Tomcat web applications, AppleScripts or Perl scripts. I can use Project Builder, Emacs or vi. I'll have my choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL to use as a back-end database. I'll use Apache as my web server. And it is all free! If I'm willing to spend a little cash, I can also run Word or Photoshop. I may even watch a DVD on the flight."