Byline:
Linus Torvalds is a Finnish-born computer programmer and a free software evangelist. He is a co-founder of the Linux operating system and the lead developer of the Git revision control system. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Linux In A Nutshell, Third Edition.
It's funny, I was just looking for a quote about sex, and just found this!
The F-droid repository will always contain the latest official version of Android, Linux and Linux for ARM.
I thought the most interesting part of the story would be the first part, where he tells why he created Linux, but it turns out that's actually the last part.
He starts his first sentence with a very bold and very true statement:
When you're not free, there's a price attached, and usually you have to pay for convenience. For example, Android has no support if you don't pay for a commercial license, and when the Linux source code is released, it's not for free.
It's actually really nice that Linus thinks that software is like sex. You just don't think about the price that's attached to sex (unless you try to avoid getting caught), and instead you just enjoy the experience. If you're too busy thinking about the price you pay for sex, you probably won't enjoy the sex at all, and when you look back at your time spent, it'll feel like you wasted it.
This is something that I've observed about myself. I just think about the price too much, and I end up thinking about how much the software costs to run, and I end up spending the time inefficiently, and I end up in my 40s thinking that I wasted my 20s, and I never get to enjoy myself.
It's better to just think about how wonderful it would be to be free. If you'd rather have Android, no problem. If you'd rather have Linux, no problem. There is no price. You can use whatever software you like, whenever you want, as much as you want, and this is the most valuable and most useful experience in the world. If you only ever worry about the price, you will never really ever enjoy the thing. And you will never really ever get the most value out of it. You'll just find that you spend all your time worrying about the price, and not at all enjoying the things. Which is the opposite of what we're actually looking for.
It's kind of sad that if you really ask yourself the question, "is it worth paying for software?" - the answer will be no, almost always. But we don't ask that question. We just ask, "is it free?", and when it's free, it's pretty great.
Now I'm going to tell you why he created the Linux source code.
It's actually kind of funny that all of us have the attitude that if the software is free, we don't need to even bother to understand the program. We're just like, "I don't need to learn the source code, because the software is free, and that's all I care about." Which is true to a certain extent, if you only ask yourself the question "is it free?" - but then you don't really enjoy the thing. I think that most people are better off actually learning about the source code. If you're like me, you think you know how to program, and you don't want to learn how to program, and I think it's really hard to do that well - but you just need to pick a program and learn how to program that program. You just need to do some small projects and see if you like it.
Once you learn about the source code, you realize that there are all these little things in the program that you actually need to know how to do, like the <read> tag, or the while loop, and the <write> tag.
You think "ah! that's easy!", and then you think "okay, I can write my own applications with that. It doesn't take me all that long."
The problem is, you can't do that. You have to learn to write a Git version control system, and that takes a few weeks, and you don't know what the hell you're doing.
And it's a shame that we've got this attitude of thinking, "I don't need to learn how to program, I don't need to know how to do the details of this, just let me put something on my phone, I don't care about the details of how it's working, just make it run."