As scientist, the least thing I expected, when yesterday I listened to the very interesting Linus Torvalds speech at TED, was a discussion on the way science and its results are diffused. I was pleased to hear Linus mentioning arXiv, the famous science archive of paper.

ArXiv is entirely opened, you can browse and download articles without any restriction (you don’t even have to login). It’s updated daily and it’s articulated in various disciplines. As a whole, it’s a very pragmatic way to show the benefit of free idea circulation within science.

At the moment writing, arXiv contains 1,178,149 articles. Not bad.

I do admit I did not expect Linus was aware of its existence, being into a rather different ecosystem.

Well, now I understand that there are deep links between the open source paradigm and a certain way to think about science and about the spreading of its methodologies and its results.

Something which has a deep connection with a very simple word, “open“. A simple word that it can disclose a whole world.

Something Linus addressed very well, in just a few words.