Walter Isaacson Quote

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish, he said. I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help.136

Walter Isaacson

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish, he said. I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help.136

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About Walter Isaacson

Walter Seff Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is an American journalist who has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna and Elon Musk. As of 2024, Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and, since 2018, an interviewer for the PBS and CNN news show Amanpour & Company.
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.