Linux Magazine heeft een al in december 2000 op papier gepubliceerd interview met Linus Torvalds online gezet. Alhoewel het niet heel erg up-to-date is, geeft dit interview toch erg veel informatie. Dit keer niet over over biljarten en bier, maar over inhoudelijke zaken, zoals kernel 2.4, de inbreng van grote spelers zoals IBM en ook de prestaties van Linux in vergelijking tot bijvoorbeeld Windows NT.
Zes pagina's met vrijwel uitsluitend serieuze informatie, waarin Linus ook toegeeft dat 'ie wel eens door Microsoft met feiten om de oren geslagen is zonder daarop een goed antwoord te hebben. Geen artikel om een stammenoorlog te doen uitbreken, maar juist een artikel waarin Linus èrg open en eerlijk op een aantal zaken ingaat, getuige ook de volgende quotes:
LM: And on a personal level, do you think it is fun trying to beat NT and Solaris?LT: It's very much been a part of the motivational thing to always have something to compare against. If you don't have anything to compare against, it's very hard to make good judgments on what you're good at and what you're bad at. For example, one of the issues last year was the MindCraft thing [MindCraft is an independent research laboratory that last year reported test results -- paid for by Microsoft -- indicating that Windows NT outperformed Linux in certain basic server tasks. Ed].
LM: How hard was that to deal with?
LT: It was really personal for a few months. I took it fairly personal, especially the way they did it.
LM: What happened?
LT: Well, it was a panel discussion in Chicago and it was the first time I'd been on the floor at the same time as people from Microsoft. Five minutes before the panel started, the Microsoft guy handed out this paper that contained the results from the MindCraft study, and I didn't even have time to really see what it meant. So, when he actually took this up in the panel, it was hard for me to say anything.
LM: But in the end, Microsoft was right, don't you think?
LT: Microsoft was right. The point was that it actually gave us a much better baseline to compare what we were bad at. We'd probably been naive and thought that we were doing some things really well. Then having somebody do that comparison was very motivational. That was quite important.
Everybody expected some kind of attack from Microsoft, so I think we'd been a bit arrogant in believing that there were so many benchmarks that we were so much better at than NT. It took a lot of people by surprise, including me. We really lost badly in that one. There was certainly that kind of naivete.
Het complete interview kun je terugvinden op Linux Magazine.