At the time he was against microkernels, QNX had already demonstrated they were faster than the monolithic state of the art. [1]

Linux does not have any form of capabilities (maybe Capsicum, but it's not finished). Capabilities are not POSIX capabilities, which redefined a decade-old term, but rather this [2].

The rest is just trite dismissals of the same faux pragmatism that Linus embodies. He's "not interested in the theoretical", as if there is any other? Before the now-mundane ideas became the staples of pragmatists, they were theories hidden in the research literature.

Linus is a major figurehead and his promoting of self-destructive attitudes is undesirable.

In fact, you claim he lives in the here and now. He does not. The here and now has long surpassed him and he now lives in his own realm.

[1] https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.p...

[2] http://www.eros-os.org/essays/capintro.html

My vote goes to Spender.

The first systems to be designed for robustness (and have it in practice) were opposite of Linus's approach to doing things. There's some similarities on occasion, which mainly shows talent learned through trial and error. The proven principles for highly reliable and secure OS's aren't applied, though. This is intentional despite massive evidence to the contrary of his position.

Meanwhile, systems like THE (Dijkstra), Burroughs B5500, IBM System/38, GEMSOS (Schell), RC4000 (Hansen), MULTICS, KeyKOS (Bomberger et al), and VAX VMM Security Kernel (Karger/Lipner) showed how to design and implement systems with ultra-high reliability and/or security. These lessons were mostly ignored time and time again even when they could be applied. User-mode drivers and languages with pointer/buffer/stack protection would have by themselves prevented ridiculous amounts of problems. I heard that, after around 2-3 decades, the UNIX crowd is adding some user-mode drivers. See the problem?

Note: Far as lightweight systems & adaptivity, you should see the work of Brinch Hansen, Niklaus Wirth, and Andy Tannenbaum. They applied safe, modular techniques on systems with less resources than today's. UNIX and Linus resist for both personal preference and inertia, not valid technical objections.

No, nobody should give Linus any slack whatsoever. He's responsible for the current fiasco, where stock Linux kernel is a joke security-wise, one can find reliable vulnerabilities in a few hours, once the debugging infrastructure is there. Compare that with Windows where it's a few weeks to a few months and then a lot more work to get the reliability.

Linus holds the vast majority of the blame here, simply put, he is an idiot when it comes to security or looking ahead at how things will be in a couple of years. Linux is slowly entering every single aspect of our lives and this trend will only accelerate via IoT. Imagine what this means about security with Linus in charge.

We now KNOW that there are intelligent adversaries out there that spend hundreds of millions to defeat security worldwide. It is simply UNACCEPTABLE and downright MALICIOUS STUPIDITY for Linus to hold the views he does in this day and age. He's been repeatedly warned and cautioned for more than a DECADE now and he's laughed at and ignored valid criticisms from people with much more foresight than him. If this trend continues, he should be NAILED to the cross.

A security bug is NOT just a bug.

No, I shouldn't have to DISCONNECT everything that runs Linux from the Internet if I want it to have a modicum of security.

I think that your tone will turn a lot of people off, which is why you've been downvoted (by others), but I think that what you said needs to be heard, especially re: IoT. It's a nightmare waiting to happen.

> Linux kernel is a joke security-wise, one can find reliable vulnerabilities in a few hours

Do you have some details on this? I did not realise the situation was so bad.

I'm not sure objectively what the current state is. However, it's a little known fact that Linux kernel specifically (due to fame) benefits from tons of academic work on bug hunting tools. Every time they run a new one, they find all kinds of problems that are preventable with a safer language or sound architecture. Many of them would've been contained in a microkernel architecture rather than have full access to memory.

So, one could say it's pretty bad even if the "many eyes" and code audits are finding/fixing a ton. Simply too many to justify if their process is any good. An recent example I found was the Saturn project throwing an automated tool at it and finding 100+ real bugs in one go.

http://saturn.stanford.edu/pages/papersindex.html

I am unaware of the security warnings etc. against Linus and Linux in general as I am a bit out of touch with Linux, having moved to OSX a few years back.

Do you have recommended reading or links so that I can get up to speed?

Did you read the linked article? Grsecurity people, gentoo security people and other security insiders have been urging Linus and other maintainers to change their views for decades. Nothing has happened except plenty of hand waving and ridicule. Visit the grsecurity forums, the IRC channel for more details.

Here is a recent example where PaX team are called "leeches" by a maintainer: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2015-A...

If this sort of attitude is not stupid, I don't know what is. These people can't see the forest from the trees.

Ah more reading required. Thanks!