When Sun releases Solaris as open source software, will you take a peek?
Probably not. Not because of any animosity, but simply because I don't have the time or the interest. Linux has never been about "others", it's been about getting better than itself, so I don't really have any motivation to play around with Solaris. I'm sure that if it does something particularly well, people will be more than happy to tell me all about it.
Surely if you like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, there might be some handy ideas in Solaris. Why ignore it?
Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
But more importantly, if I'm wrong, that's OK. People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
Let us suppose it's a few years down the road and Linux has crushed the versions of Unix in the marketplace. Where do you look for inspiration at that point?
I've never had a dearth of inspiration so far.
The things to do come not really from other systems, but from users. People seldom say "I need Linux to do Y, because Unix did Y," and in fact, that's an argument I fundamentally don't believe in. Rather, the problems that people have are more along the lines of "I need to do X, and I can't find a way to do it" to "I can do it this way, but it sucks because of Y." And that is where the inspiration really comes from.
How much do you spend on near-term planning and on long-term planning? I think you tend to be an improvisational, issue-of-the-moment person, not a let's-design-a-big-framework-that-will-last-five-years person.
Yes. I really can't plan my way out of a cardboard box.
All my long-term stuff is very fuzzy "intuitive" stuff, not something I could really put into words. I try to avoid having very specific goals in the long term, and instead have more of a general feel for what kinds of things I like and don't like. Some people may see that as undirected, and hell yes, it is. On the other hand, it's pretty flexible, and exactly because I'm not focusing on some specific goal five years from now I'm also not losing track of the problems people experience today, or ignoring somebody else's vision.
I find people with big visions interesting but often a bit scary. One of my constant arguments on the kernel mailing list (in various guises) is to not redesign the world, but try to make specific small improvements, and let the big payoffs be kind of incidental.
