John Martin

Linux : Akteure : Personen : John Martin : Übersicht
07-Dec-2001/09-Jan-07

Übersicht

Looking back on the meteoric rise of Linux over the past few years, some of our original kernel hackers have expressed surprise, enthusiasm or a cautious optimism over the distance the open-source operating system has traveled, from Internet hack to Wall Street/Silicon Valley darling. But in and among the many comments we've heard a slight tone of nostalgia for the old days, typified by the passing comment from one of those original kernel hackers, John Martin.

It might have been more fun within a small community. With the Internet early on, there was a sufficiently large community to sustain itself, while it was not viewed as threatening to the powerful. [However,] once Linux got bigger, it may have been important to get very big, very quickly.

Today, John Martin is an independent consultant with ``practically no time to call my own,'' he says. But once upon a time, he was just another hacker looking for something interesting on which to ply his talents. ``I was working with big iron, but was interested in learning about UNIX when I stumbled upon the Linux-activists list,'' John says. He had a new Intel box that ``would not run anything until I tried Linux, which worked immediately.'' Worked, that is, except for a small file system problem that he was able to fix by way of a workaround developed by Stephen Tweedie. John was up and running within two hours of first trying to boot from the floppy. ``I never looked back,'' John says. ``I wanted to do what little I could to put something back into the community.''

He calls the Linux activists ``congenial and productive''. But, like many original kernel hackers, he didn't think he and his colleagues had embarked upon anything especially new, per se. ``The challenge to the orthodoxy of large-scale software development was apparent long before Linux 1.0,'' John notes. Similarly, John has little time for the financial pyrotechnics that have accompanied Linux's rising popularity as a potential ``Windows killer,'' nor is he particularly interested in issues of commercialization of Linux or what is often called Linux profiteering. John says,

If commercial applications must be written, better they be written for Linux than for something else. Proprietary software and protocols are evil for practical reasons. Linux and open software and protocols are good for practical reasons. It is because these practical reasons are profound that they are embodied in a philosophy.

A tremendous fan of the GPL, which John considers the most important thing about Linux (``the GPL and the Linux development community ... seem inseparable''), he is no less passionate about open-source software in general. ``Support only open source,'' he says. ``Unless one believes that the value of pi and the human genome should be patented, this is no place for equivocation.''

John Martin's e-mail address is jam@jamux.com.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4037.

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