By Kate Hanaghan, 13 May 2001 20:00
NEWS Although he has absolutely no intention of shedding his geek god status in favour of business leadership, Torvalds hasn't refrained from letting his opinion be known. He is highly critical of the aggressive marketing techniques used by Microsoft and said: "I would never do business that way myself." Linus also criticised the way these three dominant players throw punches at one another to gain competitive ground. He said: "I try to avoid the kinds of religious wars that Sun and Oracle tend to get into when it comes to Microsoft." He added: "I actually think you tend to start making bad decisions when you make your decisions based on fear and loathing and hatred, which I think Sun and Oracle have been doing when it comes to Microsoft." Torvalds has acquired a status most techies can only dream of, but he keeps his feet on the ground. His strategy is to knuckle down and stay out of industry furores. He added: "My approach has been to ignore Microsoft completely and ignore most of the competition, except by way of measuring Linux's technical worth." This is not to say that Torvalds doesn't enjoy sounding off, just like Ellison, for example. William Knottenbelt, an operating systems specialist at Imperial College, London, said of Torvalds: "Linus has a very large ego and he always has." However, Knottenbelt explained that Linus is in a position where he can afford to be judgmental. He said: "He's out to create a good technical product and has no shareholders to please." Today, however, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun were all keeping quiet. All said they could not comment on Linus' remarks.
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