"I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge."

Linux, he feels - and open source software in general - has history on its side.

Last month when asked by BusinessWeek whether as leader of what BW called the Linux movement he was a "benevolent dictator" or not, Torvalds was refreshingly honest. 

"I am a dictator," he conceded. "But it's the right kind of dictatorship."

This latest award, from The Economist magazine, is due to be presented to Torvalds at a ceremony in San Francisco. His innovation award, for Linux, is in the Computing category. Other technological winners include the creator of Toyota's hybrid car - the Prius - and Vic Hayes, former chair of IEEE 802.11 Standards Working Group (for Wireless LANs).

Here is the citation in full, which in its rather dry form is more or less a History of Linux in a Nutshell:

"Computing, Linux: Linus Torvalds, Fellow, Open Source Development Lab. Torvalds originated Linux in 1991 as a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dissatisfied with the MS-DOS (and early Windows) operating system standard prevalent on PCs, Torvalds made Linux freely available for downloading, releasing the source code so that people with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own needs. The software created a huge following, eventually attracting big industry players such as Oracle, IBM, Intel, Netscape and others. It also spawned several new software companies, including Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux. Today, there are hundreds of millions of copies of Linux running on servers, desktop computers, network equipment and in embedded devices worldwide. With the support of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Torvalds now works exclusively on vendor-independent, neutral development of the Linux kernel."

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