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Linus Torvalds writes the Linux kernel, he also likes a good mailing list flamewar, not least because he has a very sarcasatic wit. Here he is, writing about various topics.

On fair use:

When you start thinking that you have absolute control over the content or programs you produce, and that the rest of the worlds opinions doesn't matter, you're just _wrong_.

Me, personally, I think the RIAA and the MPAA is a shithouse. They are immoral.

On virtualization:

I think what you're seeing is virtualization proponents being absolutely _desperate_ for any reason to use virtualization.

On userspace binary drivers:

No user-space ass-hattery here.

On turning off interrupt requests:

You cannot have a generic kernel driver that doesn't know about the low-level hardware (not with current hardware - you could make the "shut the f*ck up" a generic thing if you designed hardware properly, but that simply does not exist in general right now).

On those arguing for userpace interrupt request handlers:

You may be a bit simple. But I think it's more polite to call you "special". Or maybe just not very used to how hardware works.

On C++ :

In fact, in Linux we did try C++ once already, back in 1992. It sucks. Trust me...

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

So I'm sorry, but for something like git, where efficiency was a primary objective, the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage.

On Linux Kernel version 2.6.19:

It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config, you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways.

On Intel's inventions:

The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at _any_ point pretty damn ugly. And the fact that MB vendors don't test it with anything else than Windows (and sometimes you wonder whether they do even that) doesn't help.

EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI). It's totally different from a normal BIOS, and was brought on by ia64, which never had a BIOS, of course. Sadly, Apple bought into the whole "BIOS bad, EFI good" hype, so we now have x86 machines with EFI as the native boot protocol.

On Apple OS X:

OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.