You have to admit that getting Torvolds’ thoughts on Microsoft’s future is certainly interesting to say the least.

By way of an apology for the paucity of posts today, here’s an interview I did with Linus Torvalds earlier this year. In it, Linus talks about the future of proprietary software models, Microsoft, and, of course, open source software.

Open source programs have clearly made some great advances in the past few years. We’ve seen it with Linux and Mozilla. What sort of future do you foresee for open source? What do you foresee happening to software vendors tied to proprietary software models?

The power of open source really lies in various groups improving and building on an increasingly bigger existing base and slowly turning that base into commodity. One of the keywords here is “slowly” - it’s by its very nature pretty evolutionary, i.e. it takes time. It’s, in my opinion, also pretty unstoppable, but the process definitely makes it possible for proprietary vendors to generally take advantage of the open source commodity base, and continue to be proprietary “on top” of that base.

So I don’t think the proprietary vendors go away per se, I think they just end up moving higher up in the food chain. For most of them, that isn’t even necessarily very painful: Regardless of how commoditized the base is, commercial users will pretty clearly want to have support for it, so even with a totally open source technical product, the “higher up the food chain” thing will likely always exist in the form of services and support. [Read the rest]