Linus Torvalds, the unassuming Finn who was recently elected Leader of the Free World in a tongue-in-cheek Linuxcare poll, outlined his future plans for the Linux operating system in a keynote for the Linux World Expo on Tuesday March 2. I’m not a visionary, Torvalds said, this industry has enough visionaries. I just know where I want to go and how to get there. Torvalds promised to concentrate on the kernel, noting that the last stable version of Linux lasted two and a half years. That tells people something, he observed, you are not forced to upgrade. You aren’t caught in the endless maze of upgrades forced upon you just to allow you to run your programs. He hopes the current stable version, 2.2, will last another two or three years. Torvalds noted that the Linux development tree allows an aggressive schedule under which bugs are fixed early. Still to come: scalable SMP groundwork, high performance file system interfaces and solid multi-platform support. In 2.2, we’re the middle of the pack, he said, better than most for stability, but not the top… We’ll be concentrating on changing that. He warned his audience not to get too caught up in the current atmosphere of hype over Linux. We want to take over the world, he admitted, but it doesn’t have to be tomorrow. A few days or a week or two from now is okay.
