Reading 09: Emulating Linus' World
First, I will briefly note that I think Linus’ upbringing in a family of academics and his father’s involvement with the communist party were, as he admits, likely influential on his decision to open source his kernel software. In considering Bill Gates and Steve Jobs lives, their development in a pure capitalist environment led to their focus on economic payoffs from writing software. Although not a radical political ideologue, Linus’ exposure to communist teachings was likely crucial to his ambivalence towards making money on his software. However, I found the most interesting part of Linus’ upbringing was the academic environment that cultivated the development procedure of Linux. In my previous post , I derided ESR for failing to consider the economic burden carried by the majority of his massive peer review open source network. While I still believe his argumentation about the strength of open source is weakened by not offering a method for supporting the masses o