Compliance Toolkit

Story: Linus Torvalds speaks out against EU patent law

Posted by: N.Cat (Tuesday 23 November 2004, 2:19 PM)

> Who cares what Linus Torvalds thinks? Is he a lawyer? No! Does he understand European politics? No! Is he a successful businessman? No!

Aside from the doubtful nature of Torvalds' legal advice, these statements are so factually incorrect as to be ridiculous. This is not an issue of policy, but of laws that will dictate how computer programs can written.

And the people it directly applies to are programmers like them.

> Did he kick off a really useful concept in computer programming? Yes.

No, he wrote a popular operating system - if this concept you're referring to goes by the label "open source", look a bit further back into the 1960s, when academic sharing of code under liberal licences was common, or more recently, to projects like GNU - this was already well established by the time Torvalds took up their free tools to tinker on his software.