tlug.linux.or. jp LT and RMS interview backgrouns info

Background information on the Linus Torvalds and RMS interviews.

By Hiroo Yamagata

The interviews were assigned by hotWIRED Japan , for their first issue that came out in 97/9/20.

The whole thing took place from 97/08/03 to 97/08/08. I sent out a set of Qs to both Linus and RMS on that day from Tokyo, and then Linus sent back the answers immediately on 97/08/05 through e-mail from California. That was basically it. The texts retain what he actually typed to me.

RMS said that his hands hurt, and because of that, he didn't want to type the answers. He wanted it to be done through phone. I was at the Hackers convention "Beyond HOPE", and so I called him from NY, didn't work out because his office at MIT had a blackout and there were no lights. So the thing took place the next day 8/8, between NY and Cambridge, MA.

I tried to go through each question that I sent him through e-mail, but he kept cutting in to correct my basic terminology (which is apparent throughout the interview), so the actual thing came out quite different than what I had expected (in a rather interesting way, I think). I typed up the manuscript, while RMS started to answer my original e-mail questions that he did not touch upon on the phone. So I incorporated them into the interview, and then sent the English version for approval, where he suggested some more corrections. The thing was finalized on 8/15.

I should mention that the money that I get from hotWIRED on these articles go to the FSF, XFree86 and some other Linux related free software project (any suggestions to which ones?), since they are the main attractions.

You can find the hotWIRED versions (which are slightly abridged) at the following URLs;

RMS interview;
(Japanese)
(English)

Linus interview;
(Japanese)
(English)

The guys at hotWIRED Japan (NTT Learning) were cool enough to put these interviews under GPL (well, to the extent that written documents can be GPL'd.) Consider it as something similar to the conditions of the Linux Documentation Project documents.