I'm a big fan of Torvalds as a person and Linux as a movement. However, taking intent of the peace prize in mind -- "during the preceding year [...] shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." -- I don't really see his eligibility.
Well, the only true test for his eligibility is "Does awarding the Nobel Prize to this person advance the interests of the Nobel Committee?", but given that an award to Linus doesn't obviously embarrass George Bush, I'm thinking you're probably right.
It is a nice thought, but it does seem to not fall under the scope of the prize.
It would probably make more sense to pursue the creation of a Nobel (or other global prize) category for Compuational/Information Sciences. The impact of progress in this field have just as much, if not more, of an effect on the world today as the other Nobel fields (Chemsitry, Biology, etc.)
Note: I am not saying this is a realistic possibility, but it is probably more likely than a computer scientist winning the peace prize.
It seems like there are plenty of people in the field (as well as other Engineering related fields that are more relevant to the world now than they were during the creation of the Nobel prizes) that justify a global acknowledgement. Considering the importance of the internet in global daily life, and the fact that now jQuery is used on 1/5th of the world's websites, it seems Resig has had enough influence on the world to deserve metion too. Remember, the Nobel prizes stress more recent accomplishments over past successes.
I agree that it would be nice to have a CS nobel (or engineering, etc.), but that thought is unrelated to the peace prize question. A CS prize would be handed out with respect to technical merit, just like the other scientific ones.
However, the peace prize would be awarded based on promoting peace. For example, if Twitter one day actually enabled a revolution to take place, it could arguably be eligible for the nobel peace prize, but probably not the CS prize. Similarly, solving a very hard algorithmic problem would get you the CS prize but not the peace prize.
I think the question of whether Linus deserves the award is a very interesting one indeed, because it leads to a much more fundamental question:
"If I cure world hunger, I deserve the prize. But what if I write a script that runs in the background and five years later cures world hunger, do I still deserve the prize?"
Its just automation right?
I think Linux is itself prize-worthy, and thus since we can not hand the award to Linux itself, I think it would be a wonderful statement to give it to its original creator. I believe Linux really has changed/helped the world that much, and I think it would also make the important statement that politics isn't the only way of improving the world.
I understood that there is no Nobel prize for Mathematics, which computing is considered an extension of. Nobel deliberately committed Mathematics. Would it be wrong to add a Nobel award against Nobel's wishes?
Well, the foundation that manages the prize money fund operate according to the will of Alfred Nobel, and they can't add any prize.
However, you could do something like the economy prize which is actually awarded by the Swedish national bank, and is "in memory of Alfred Nobel". It'd be a bit more work to get such a new prize to be included among the others though. You could try bribing the King of Sweden, it might work! :-)
I am not an Obama fan (at all) but I can follow their logic. He does hold promise in the specific area of promoting peace. However, I certainly don't think he did the most in this area over the last year.
That's one reason why I think the Nobel prize is a perversion. The set of eligible people is not one or two people. There are a lot of people who do great things and in the end, the selection is fairly arbitrary. Honoring someone for doing someone honorable is good; Conferring enormous authority to one person by granting them a prize diminishes the authority of other great people.
Take Krugman. He got a Nobel for a very very specific area of economics. He now writes on an area that was not his specific focus nor has he proven himself particularly insightful. However, if he gets in an argument with other respected economists, the general perception is, "who has the Nobel?"
This observation applies to all prizes, and is articulated well from another angle by Feynman (commenting on his own Nobel prize): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61KMw5zVhg
To be fair, the main reason Obama got the prize was for the dramatic change in diplomatic relations between the US and, well, everyone else. The previous eight years basically consisted of a repeating monologue of "It's our way or the highway", whereas now the US is actually engaging in dialogue.
That said, I completely agree it was premature and that he shouldn't have gotten it before having actually achieved something more than making pretty speeches.
It's truly ironic, but Obama being not-Bush has indeed been good for world peace as a whole. Compare their respective diplomatic approaches to China and Russia.
Was this one of those deals where you negotiate by making them wince first and then coming in with an offer that alone wouldn't have succeeded but now looks peachy (really nice) compared to the wince-inducing proposal.
Linux, and free software in general, most certainly does promote "fraternity between nations" since it's all about people collaboratively developing something that benefits the entire human species. Though personally I'd be more inclined to give the prize to Stallman.
"Linux helped sequence the human genome, helps protect the world computer infrastructure from viral attack, and is now the pathway for millions to learn computer programming and participate in new international efforts"
Using this logic, Bill Gates should also be up for the award (and considering his philanthropy, maybe he should).
There is a paradigm problem here. One does not award the builder of Mother Teresa's orphanage a peace prize (even if it is quite nice). The award goes to Mother Teresa.
I wouldn't really call malaria a "disease of poverty" - it's a bad idea to take the most effective prophylactic indefinitely (it's an antibiotic), and it can have plenty of side effects - and it's nowhere near 100% effective. (coincidentally, I've been taking it for the last 3 weeks) So non-poor people who live in affected regions can't keep on taking it either and therefore can and do catch malaria. It is treatable if caught early enough (I guess this is your poverty angle?) but anything but pleasant even if treatment is successful. Moreover, once you've had it, it can come back anytime during the rest of your life, rich or poor.
Of course, that makes it no less of a problem, and curing it once and for all would certainly be prizeworthy.
Torvalds, Stallman, and Lessig would make an excellent combination, in my opinion - they've done incredible things to expand the intellectual commons, and that does great things for the "fraternity of nations". Think of all the international friendships and other relationships maintained using open source tools and the ideas of open culture.
Other than Lessig, that trio does not even begin to represent me or innumerable other open source developers. RMS and Linus represent GPL and Linux developers, who are are only one component of the broader community.
The GPL/Linux ideals are clearly and fundamentally opposed to my own, and I would be insulted if RMS and Linus accepted the award on behalf of the open source community at large.
You're right--Gore started the job of devaluing the prizes, now we just have to give one to Stallman and nobody will ever care about the Nobel Prize again.
Without RMS there might not be a GPL nor Linux licensed under the GPL. There would probably be no open source movement either because it relies on free software.
The thing is there are a lot of GPL-like licenses. Linux might have ended up under a BSD-style license rather than a GPL license. While things certainly would have been different, I'm not convinced they would have been worse.
The assertion that there would be no open source movement without RMS is a bit difficult to believe, unless we are going for a very narrow definition of open source.
Linux under BSDL? We already know how that would end. We'd lose half a generation's best work because it's trapped in the wreckage of vendors' failed proprietary forks.
Your argument makes the unfounded assumption that those vendors would have done the work you "lost" if the code had been GPL licensed.
As a counterpoint, FreeBSD has progressed at a steady clip -- I fail to see how it is significantly behind Linux, and is significantly ahead in many areas.
It falls behind by not being as popular. I think this is not a result of BSD being inferior, it's just how things came into being. I don't have numbers on BSD developers or the rate of improvement, but I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.
... I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.
No, it was just timing. The AT&T lawsuit cast a palor on the BSDs just when Linux started hitting its stride. By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had dominant mindshare.
Same reason why MySQL is popular -- PHP gave it the mindshare. Same reason why PHP is popular -- it was one of the few options available at the time, and by the time better things came along, it was already firmly rooted.
So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD?
And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),
The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.
It shows almost no success because the code that makes MacOS X and Windows what they are is still proprietary. Having a UNIX shell in MacOS X might be nice, but that's only one part of the system.
I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.
So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.
Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.
Without RMS there might not be a GPL nor Linux licensed under the GPL. There would probably be no open source movement either because it relies on free software.
Yeah, but RMS doesn't shower as much as I think he should, so clearly he is not worthy of recognition for his work. GNU, Emacs, gcc, the Free Software Foundation... even a plant could have made all those. But showering... there's something that makes you truly elite...
It's not at all clear to me that when Torvalds started Linux he was necessarily trying to advance world peace. His motivations seem to have been much more practical and somewhat self motivated (scratching a personal itch). If they're handing out prizes Richard Stallman might be a better candidate, since his motives were explicitly altruistic from the outset (advancing freedom for computer users).
RMS and Torvalds should share the prize. RMS deserves it since he's the founder of the idea of free software, and Torvalds deserves it because based on the idea he created a collaborative movement of exceptional engineering.
Yes, the peace prize has sometimes gone to controversial or unexpected people, but that doesn't mean the process is completely without rules. First, these people can nominate for the peace prize:
If you're not on that list, sending Norwegian Ubuntu CDs to the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as the article suggests is going to achieve absolutely nothing.
"and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses"
Does Linus Torvalds fit that description? Not even remotely close. If the author of the article had spent a few more minutes actually researching the rules, and not just browsing Wikipedia, he could have avoided writing the thing altogether.
I think some people see the Nobel as "Awards for great things", but really it hasn't caught up with the times. Politics is also involved. So it's "Awards for whoever they THINK has done great things" - also bound by categories which don't even include mathematics (the non-Nobel/pseudo prize is for Economics)...
Linus deserves a Nobel Prize, but he likes flamewars way too much to get the Peace Prize. How about literature? Why should that be limited to writers of human languages?
What about the economics prize (I know, not a real nobel prize) going to members of the free/open source software community. Their works have really shown that great things can be built by a community of people, with limited central leadership and without a clear profit motive.
Linus deserves this way more than Obama does. Why? Because you don't give prizes for expected good work. You give a prize looking back on what's been accomplished.
I think this nomination will help inspire the next generation of young hackers, and I say go for it.
Disgusting. If anything, Richard Stallman should be nominated for it as he has done far more and the Free Software movement is much more in line with the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize.
What he's saying is that Linus is a more behind-the-scenes person, not a public figure (although he does make quite a few controversial forum posts). RMS is out there, at the front, campaigning for his ideals.
Maybe it's because I'm up late - but I read sarcasm in that post.. RMS talks a lot (similar perhaps to the latest Nobel prize winner* (nominated 8 days into office)), whereas Linus gets stuff done.
