[via BusinessWeek]

An interview of Linus Torvalds in BusinessWeek.

Hardware companies are selling more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter, while sales of servers running proprietary software continue to fall. And now, slowly but surely, Linux is making inroads on the desktop as well. According to IBM, 10 million desktops ran Linux in 2004 — a 40% jump from a year ago.

[…] What you see is that new blood tends to concentrate on the things that the old projects didn’t do, and thus the horizons for open source keep on widening.

The applications and services [companies] are just a sign that the core competencies of open source have grown up enough that these things make sense. It certainly wasn’t something you could do five years ago; the infrastructure just wasn’t there.

What about Linux on the desktop? Why hasn’t it taken off?
Oh, it has absolutely taken off, but some people seem to think that “take off” means that suddenly everybody is running it. That’s clearly not true. It’s a very slow conversion.