Wired has a interview with Bill Joy – co-founder of what used to be called Stanford University Network aka Sun Microsystems, Grandfather of lots of sexy hardware and also Java – where he makes quite a few interesting remarks.
Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.
Later on he has this to say:
I’m figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet.
Even more sexy would have been Apple G4 Cube machines ๐
On Open source he says the following:
Open source is fine, but it doesn’t take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there’s nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn’t assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don’t need to see the source code. I just want a system that works
As always I think he has his head on in 100% the right way.
