Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize?

I understood that there is no Nobel prize for Mathematics, which computing is considered an extension of. Nobel deliberately committed Mathematics. Would it be wrong to add a Nobel award against Nobel's wishes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Lack_of_a_Nobel_Pri...

We sort of have a Nobel Prize for CS -- the Turing Award. This could also be compared to the Fields Medal for mathematics.

I agree that it would be nice to have a CS nobel (or engineering, etc.), but that thought is unrelated to the peace prize question. A CS prize would be handed out with respect to technical merit, just like the other scientific ones.

However, the peace prize would be awarded based on promoting peace. For example, if Twitter one day actually enabled a revolution to take place, it could arguably be eligible for the nobel peace prize, but probably not the CS prize. Similarly, solving a very hard algorithmic problem would get you the CS prize but not the peace prize.

I think the question of whether Linus deserves the award is a very interesting one indeed, because it leads to a much more fundamental question:

"If I cure world hunger, I deserve the prize. But what if I write a script that runs in the background and five years later cures world hunger, do I still deserve the prize?"

Its just automation right?

I think Linux is itself prize-worthy, and thus since we can not hand the award to Linux itself, I think it would be a wonderful statement to give it to its original creator. I believe Linux really has changed/helped the world that much, and I think it would also make the important statement that politics isn't the only way of improving the world.

I am not an Obama fan (at all) but I can follow their logic. He does hold promise in the specific area of promoting peace. However, I certainly don't think he did the most in this area over the last year.

That's one reason why I think the Nobel prize is a perversion. The set of eligible people is not one or two people. There are a lot of people who do great things and in the end, the selection is fairly arbitrary. Honoring someone for doing someone honorable is good; Conferring enormous authority to one person by granting them a prize diminishes the authority of other great people.

Take Krugman. He got a Nobel for a very very specific area of economics. He now writes on an area that was not his specific focus nor has he proven himself particularly insightful. However, if he gets in an argument with other respected economists, the general perception is, "who has the Nobel?"

To be fair, the main reason Obama got the prize was for the dramatic change in diplomatic relations between the US and, well, everyone else. The previous eight years basically consisted of a repeating monologue of "It's our way or the highway", whereas now the US is actually engaging in dialogue.

That said, I completely agree it was premature and that he shouldn't have gotten it before having actually achieved something more than making pretty speeches.

I wouldn't really call malaria a "disease of poverty" - it's a bad idea to take the most effective prophylactic indefinitely (it's an antibiotic), and it can have plenty of side effects - and it's nowhere near 100% effective. (coincidentally, I've been taking it for the last 3 weeks) So non-poor people who live in affected regions can't keep on taking it either and therefore can and do catch malaria. It is treatable if caught early enough (I guess this is your poverty angle?) but anything but pleasant even if treatment is successful. Moreover, once you've had it, it can come back anytime during the rest of your life, rich or poor.

Of course, that makes it no less of a problem, and curing it once and for all would certainly be prizeworthy.

Other than Lessig, that trio does not even begin to represent me or innumerable other open source developers. RMS and Linus represent GPL and Linux developers, who are are only one component of the broader community.

The GPL/Linux ideals are clearly and fundamentally opposed to my own, and I would be insulted if RMS and Linus accepted the award on behalf of the open source community at large.

Without RMS there might not be a GPL nor Linux licensed under the GPL. There would probably be no open source movement either because it relies on free software.

So you can stop with the insults now.

> Gore started the job of devaluing the prizes

cough cough Henry Kissinger.

Thanks for that - I don't really know much about the criteria for awarding the economics prize.

to be fair... both work hard