Torvalds the "5th Most-Powerful Man in Tech" 594
An anonymous reader writes "According to silicon.com, Linus Torvalds is the fifth most influential man in technology. The bio they have written for him isn't the most flattering to the open source community though. I quote: "If it wasn't for the presence of Lara Croft and Xena Warrior Princess, techies around the world would have posters of Torvalds on their walls."
It goes on to say: "In truth Torvalds best work is in the past"... which seems to negate their own argument for having him in there.
Also in the Top 5 is Steve Jobs (1) who comes out on top of Bill Gates (2).
As an interesting aside, the writer of the Sobig virus even makes it in at Number 42..."
Re:Darl? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where's Darl McBride on the top 50? I'd say he's pretty influential right now. Look at him, he has the UNIX world groveling before him!
According to legend, when Apple became a corporation and therefore employees had to be numbered, there wasa disagreement between Wozniak and Jobs over who to be number 1 which was settled by making Woz number 1 and Jobs number 0. Now it is Darl's turn to be 0. :) Fitting isn't it?
Vajpayee ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The list has India's prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at 8th.
India's boom - largely engineered by Vajpayee - means some analysts are predicting the country could face its own IT skills crisis over the next five years.
Nothing can be further from truth. Personally Vajpayee has had no effect on IT in India. He has no ideas or plans for the future, as far as IT is concerned. I think Narayana Murthy [redhotcurry.com] would have been a better choice.
I doubt the list is a well researched list.
Re:Agenda setting (Score:3, Interesting)
I expect Gates, McBride and Bernard Shifman would all place near the top.
Re:Agenda setting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:no RMS? (Score:3, Interesting)
The author of the results/comments most likely does not know what GNU is and he probably thinks OSS is Linux( not GNU/Linux but just Linux ). His comments about Lara Croft/etc shows that he thinks the OSS community consists mostly of high school kids. The guy is WAY out of date. IMHO.
LoB
Re:Darl? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised at Number 3...I've never heard of him. Come on, Sklyarov above Ellison? Why weren't any networking or ISP execs mentioned in the top 5. It's obvious that networking and services are the biggest growth technologies. The guys who wrote this are stuck in the past with software developers. I'm not a good programmer, but I think I can safely say that there have been no major advances or paradigm shifts in software recently.
I believe hardware and networking guys should be making the top 5 or ten people in that list. Paradigm shifts in hardware are being seen all the time. Shifts to broadband, wi-fi, miniaturization, networking technologies, these are the future.
- Not writing a sig bows to your overlords on incomprehensible slashdot estonia...
In the past? (Score:1, Interesting)
I say that rarely these days because most tech journalists, nowadays, know what they are talking about and are quite savvy.
Not only because Linus is doing some real good stuff these days, managing the kernel itself, but because if he wasn't doing anything good currently, why would he be voted higher than last year?
This person not only doesn't know tech, they have no common sense.
I have to give this journalist the Anonymous Coward Weanie Journalist of the Week award.
l8,
AC
Video gaming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:no RMS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Umm. No. Actually Linux only became popular because of the AT&T lawsuit against BSD right at the start. Once it gained momentum it was hard to shake. Another factor was probably the GPL.
While a agree that RMS is a zealot, he still managed to convince a LOT of people that GPL is somehow free and good (and that anything corporate is the work of the devil). This helped fuel the already popular Linux.
By the way, a lot of sharing goes on between the BSD kernels. And Linux does indeed have forks. Each Linux kernel is slightly differet. For instance, Redhat has patches others don't have, and of course there is the ac branch the aa branch etc. Personally, I think the number of distros is a far worse fragmentation problem than having three versions of the kernel.
Linus is influential mostly because of luck.
Darl McBride made the list -- sorta (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.silicon.com/as2003/analysis2.ht
===============
Someone who could well have fallen into this category this year but
didn't make the list at all is SCO CEO Darl McBride. He has led his
company's charge to get credit for what it claims is some of its code
turning up in Linux. So far the row has taken the form of a lawsuit
brought against IBM, headlines in the media and SCO invoicing some
users for Linux roll outs.
However, when asked what happened when his company was served with a
request to pay a SCO licence for Linux, panellist Ric Francis,
Safeway's CIO, said: "I told them to stick it. At the end of the day it
is never going to fly. It's the last dying breath of a company that is
never going to make money."
McBride - in the headlines yes, agenda setting no. There is a
difference.
===============
This list is bogus (Score:3, Interesting)
Also worth noting (Score:1, Interesting)
Last year's position : Not Placed
Some would say millions of consumers, in bedrooms and offices the world over, are doing a good job of dictating terms to the suits in music and film subsidiaries of the major entertainment conglomerates. But when the RIAA goes after a 12-year-old girl or confused pensioner, who are they going to call? Of course the answer could well be leading IP lawyer Fred von Lohmann from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, given his track record fighting the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Can currently be found defending Streamcast in a case brought by 28 entertainment companies.
Re:Where is Stallman! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Jobs is overrated (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure the above is just a troll, but Jobs' influence has dramtically changed the landscape of computing as we know it. Those fruity iMacs you mention not only changed the way we "look" at computers, but also consumables as well. After the iMac's debut, you couldn't swing a dead cat around your head without hitting something with translucent, colored plastic (sorry cat lovers).
What about OS X? How many web sites not only outright copy the look of Apple's own site? Or products that mimic the Aqua goodness? Maybe sites like Macromedia [macromedia.com] or desktop environments like KDE [kde.org].
Big deal, right? What else has he done?
His Macintosh gave us a GUI, mouse and pointers. His NeXT machine gave us the World Wide Web. His iMac gave us a simple network appliance. His OS X now gives us a UNIX environment grandparents, moms and teenagers can use.
Quite a set of lifetime achievements.