The last time I had the occasion to interview Linus Torvalds, it was 2004, and version 2.6 of the Linux kernel had been recently released. I was working on a feature titled “Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise.” The opening sentence was “If commercial Unix vendors weren’t already worried about Linux, they should be now.” How prophetic those words turned out to be.
More than 12 years later -- several lifetimes in the computing world -- Linux can be found in every corner of the tech world. What started as a one-man project now involves thousands of developers. On this, its 25th anniversary, I once again reached out to Torvalds to see whether he had time to answer some questions regarding Linux’s origins and evolution, the pulse of Linux’s current development community, and how he sees operating systems and hardware changing in the future. He graciously agreed.