it’s unix, not eunuchs

A few months ago Linus Torvalds was interviewed by Lifehacker Australia. Unfortunately the link appears to be messed up at the moment or else I would link to it. Lifehacker really digs into the tools and methodologies people use in order to get things done. An interesting tidbit popped up in their interview with Linus. Apparently after a few years in the limelight, he tired of speaking at public engagements. I don’t know if he was tired of boring questions, the adulation of geeks or was just frustrated that he wasn’t able to get much done when he was talking all the time. But he apparently started cherry picking the events he wanted to speak at.

And recently Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and investor of Digg and Twitter, followed suit declaring that he would stop speaking publicly and blog more. John C Abell, of Wired, writes in his blog that this has to do with Marc being unhappy with the quality of journalism today. Well, if that was the reason for Marc to stop doing interviews I’d have a hard time arguing with him. Media Consolidation has left us with a lot more people re-broadcasting and re-interpreting other people’s stories. Heck, even this post is a bit of a reinterpretation. But I suspect the reality may be that Marc, like Linus, would rather be actually getting some things done than talking about getting things done.