Linus to Nvidia: Yawn

The commentary lately coming from some normally eloquent tech writers — and from some in FOSS circles — has had the distinct taste of chicken. This commentary ranges from “Chicken Little,” where the sky is falling thanks to Fedora shelling out $99 to work on UEFI lockdowns, to chickenspit in the hubbub over Linus Torvald’s f-bomb to Nvidia.

The latter, of course, is a classic case of the molehill becoming a mountain thanks to commentary which takes the bigger picture and trades it all in for sensationalism.

While commentators who took the bait are now being reeled in, the reality here is that Linus is just being Linus — and I mean that in a good way — and to take a tiny slice out of context in a hour-long presentation that is, on the whole, an excellent one is a rank amateur move.

To say nothing of the fact that Linus is right about Nvidia, too — a point maybe escaping those who risking injury jumping on the Linus-is-hurting-Linux-by-being-nasty bandwagon. So while I called him out on his printer rant a while back — and I stand by that — I stand with Linus here in flipping off Nvidia.

In this instance, Linus T. speaks for me.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)