Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 06:17:23 -0500 From: "Jack Velte" <jackv@earthling.net> To: <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: linux in New York Times Message-ID: <003101be5d8b$c6e0a140$6a6c4cd1@jackv.pacbell.net>
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sorry, no FreeBSD mention. February 21, 1999 The Rebel Code By AMY HARMON One recent rainy afternoon at the home of Marcus Meissner in Erlangen, Germany, Meissner's computer froze. It was the sort of routine headache that most of us who rely on the alien machines endure on an almost daily basis. But Meissner, 25, didn't simpy reboot. Although by day a caretaker of elderly patients at a state-run nursing home, by night he is a foot soldier in the liberation army of Linux, an increasingly popular operating system that is available free on the Internet. Meissner is part of a global confederation of volunteers who are intent on ushering in a kind of parallel silicon universe in which computers don't crash, programmers readily share intellectual property and, incidentally, Microsoft Corp. has no reason to exist, because Linux already belongs to everyone. Meissner sent out an e-mail. Moments later in Budapest, a 26-year-old called Mingo -- it is the habit of the wizards who tend to Linux to refer to one another by only their e-mail avatars -- posted a fix. Gabriel, a radio astronomer in southern Spain, countered the next day with a different version. Then Petkan, a system administrator at a Bulgarian newspaper, weighed in with a new approach. The point was not simply to mend the program, but also to find the most elegant way of doing so. Of course everyone knew that Torvalds, the California-based spider at the center of this self-spinning web, would have the final say. Torvalds is Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who eight years ago, as a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, created Linux's skeletal code and released it free on the Internet. Since then, he has become something of a cult figure, regularly outranking celebrity executives like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in Internet personality polls; troll the Web and you can catch an audio clip of his uttering the correct pronunciation of Linux (LINN-ucks) and see what he wore to last year's Finnish President's Indepedence Day ball. Named for both the physicist Linus Pauling and the Peanuts character, Torvalds grew up in Helsinki in a family of journalists. His motivation for starting Linux had as much to do with pragmatism as with intellectual exploration. As an undergraduate, he couldn't afford the several thousand dollars it would have cost to buy a commercial version of Unix -- the operating system popular in the academic and corporate worlds -- so he decided to write his own. Now, when programmers, hobbyists and other Linux devotees ask him, as they do several dozen times a week, what part of the program they should work on, he tells them to come back when they know. Torvalds's moral and technical authority over Linux's evolution derives from the countless hours he has spent juggling ideas and requests submitted by the program's ever-growing network of acolytes. But it is part of the power of Linux that when its prime mover opted for a clumsy solution to Meissner's problem -- as even a cult hero occasionally does -- his lieutenants did not shrink from correcting him. To liberate the world from bad bugs, crashes and bloated software, the rebel programmers of Linux strictly adhere to a meritocratic mantra: "The best code always wins." It is hard to believe that the future of software lies in a haphazard process of far-flung programmers e-mailing each other in the middle of the night, but it just might. Beloved by techies for its remarkable ability to run for months without crashing and for its compatibility with other programs, Linux has mutated in recent months from geek fetish to a dark-horse challenger to Microsoft Windows, the ubiquitous operating system that has defined computing for a decade. A formidable array of Microsoft's competitors, including I.B.M., Intel and Oracle are lining up to back the orphan program. New companies like Red Hat Software in Durham, N.C., are aiming to make money by providing technical support for the software they can never own. In a bow to Linux's growing stature, Netscape and Intel invested last fall in Red Hat. Even Microsoft has made a show of trembling before Linux's rebel forces. In an internal memo that somehow found its way onto the Internet, a Microsoft engineer outlined the circumstances in which "Linux can win" and proposed strategies for defeating the advantages of its new competitor. Microsoft has also cited its fear of Linux in its antitrust battle with the Justice Department. Still, some perspective is in order. Linux, which runs on only about 7 million computers worldwide, has a long, long way to go before it makes a dent in Microsoft's 250-million-plus empire. And despite its growing popularity, Linux is still too complicated for the average nonideologically motivated computer user. But its significance is not solely as a product, but also as an idea -- the embodiment of what amounts to a widely held political belief among notoriously apolitical programmers that software should be better. "People have grown used to thinking of computers as unreliable, and it doesn't have to be that way," Torvalds told me one night as we sat in his office at his Santa Clara, Calif., home. "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them having a bad operating system." Torvalds lives in a modest tract house, where he moved with his wife, Tove, the six-time karate champion of Finland, two years ago to take a job at a secretive start-up partly owned by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft. The house is filled with stuffed penguins, his favorite animal -- and not incidentally, the Linux mascot -- for reasons he can't quite explain, except that they seem "friendly." When he travels he makes every effort to visit the local zoo. His favorite is in Singapore, because it has the most exotic animals and the fewest cages per capita. Each night, after tucking in his fair-haired daughters, Patricia, 2, and Daniela, 10 months, Torvalds retreats to the orange light of his computer to log several hours working on Linux. Linux's most lasting legacy may be its role in legitimizing a radical model of software development that has come to be known as "open source," in which the "source code" -- the usually secreted DNA of a computer program -- is freely released on the Internet for anyone to see, modify or redistribute. The idea is akin to the notion of Coca-Cola publishing its formula for Coke. Not surprisingly, it doesn't sit well with corporate executives, who often spend tens of millions of dollars on programmers' salaries alone. "Why should software be free?" asks Edward J. Zander, chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems. "Why should I give away what I pay millions of dollars to develop? Why doesn't General Motors give its cars away for free? Why don't you give me your newspaper for free?" But by harnessing the collective wisdom of developers worldwide, Linux partisans argue, a rigorous, informal peer review naturally emerges in which the best innovations are ratified and adopted, resulting in a better product. "I can't imagine having a problem and having to spend four hours figuring it out instead of turning to the most knowledgeable person on the Net who would know instantly how to solve it," says Marc Ewing, 29, who started Red Hat in 1993. "It would be a terrible waste of time." And the rapid growth of the Internet, which after all was created through the open-source process, has made the approach ever more feasible by broadening the universe of potential contributors and allowing for nearly instant distribution of fine-tuned fixes. "When I released Linux," Torvalds told me as we sat scanning hundreds of e-mail messages he received that day, "I thought maybe one other person would be interested in it." Among the faithful, the story of Torvalds conjuring an operating system out of a blank screen has already taken on the ring of legend. But the legend wants to correct the notion that he solely wrote the software. "The kernel" -- Linux's most vital code -- "is 1 percent of the entire program," he says. "Of that 1 percent, I've written between 5 and 10 percent. I think the most important part is that I got it started. Then people had something to concentrate on." Indeed, Torvalds places the number of volunteers who regularly contribute to the "kernel" at about 1,000, and thousands more have sent in pieces of code over the years. "I didn't ask for this army of people to come to me," he says. "They come because this is what they want to do." Of the six young men in four countries who played in the e-mail round robin of fix-the-bug, for instance, only Mingo is paid to work on Linux, and even his contribution was not directly a part of his job. But Torvalds readily concedes that Linux also owes much to the groundbreaking work of Richard Stallman, a legendary hacker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in 1984 founded the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of free software. Living out of his office at M.I.T., Stallman devoted himself to developing a free operating system. His thousands of lines of code make up many of the software tools and utilities that are a part of Linux. Still, there's no denying Torvalds's centrality to the Linux revolution. According to Eric Raymond, an evangelist of the open-source movement, programs like Linux are usually organized around one central wizard to whom the others pay fealty. The perverse cross between anarchy and a cult of personality, Raymond explains, comes from a natural tendency toward efficiency. The leader maintains his place only with the consent of his peers. In a self-published essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," which has become a manifesto for Linux devotees, Raymond sees the cathedral as the traditional mode of software development, and the bazaar as the preferable, open mode. Elite programmers prefer the bazaar, he says, because it allows them to operate in a "gift culture" in which prestige is the currency and the rich developer is the one with the best reputation. "Open-source software," or O.S.S., is really just a moniker invented by a few marketing-savvy programmers, who decided last year that they needed a term with public relations gloss for their preferred mode of developing software. But the concept dates back to the days before the rise of the personal computer, when hackers and hobbyists pushed the technology envelope; at the time, they were more engaged in the pursuit of knowledge than in corporate profits. Predictably, computer-industry lore credits Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, with heralding the end of that era with his "Open Letter to Hobbyists," first published in 1976. "Most of you steal your software," Gates wrote, piqued at how the early computer tinkerers passed around copies of any software they came across, including Microsoft's first program, the Basic computer language for the Altair 8800. "One thing you do . . . is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" With the advent of the personal computer, a new mass market for software arose, and with it, an industry renowned for its entrepreneurs and their ability to create wealth. Previously, computer innovations had largely arisen on university campuses, where the free exchange of ideas often reigned. But big business, dependent on innovations for its profits, began closely guarding its intellectual property, as software companies began making money by selling upgrades to programs that consumers had already purchased. There was nothing in it for a company offering fixes for free. With the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman tried to recapture an earlier atmosphere by developing a free operating system he called GNU. He released it under a new software license known as "copyleft," which allowed it to be endlessly copied or modified. One of Torvalds's first decisions working on Linux was to release the source code under Stallman's general public license. "I wanted people to be able to trust me without trusting me personally," Torvalds says. "So even if I turn to the dark side, nobody can take it over." Stallman thinks that some of Linux's proponents have already sold out and insists that the system's proper name is GNU-Linux. To him, the point of free software isn't that it fosters superior technology, but that it's free and urges the use of inferior free software over anything proprietary. "The free-software movement is concerned primarily with strengthening civil society," he says. "Think free as in free speech, not free beer." It seems that many have. It is hard to discount Linux contributors' claims that they do what they do for the love of it, given how much free time they devote to perfecting the program. As Petko Manolov, 24, the system administrator in Bulgaria who took part in the e-mail round robin, says: "Linux is a very good operating system written by very good programmers. And everybody can see the result. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most important is that nobody is forced to code something he or she does not believe is right. I had a bad experience in my previous job with my boss, who made me program things I'm ashamed of." Theodore Y. Ts'o, a researcher at M.I.T., speaks of Linux in spiritual terms. "There's a quote from the New Testament," he says. "'By your works you will know them.' That's what it's like. You take care of your code, and when people report bugs you fix it. You are thereby known as a provider of good software." Donald Becker, who builds Linux machines for NASA, says, "We think we're changing the world." Whether or not open-source development can work for all types of software is unclear. But already other loose-knit bands of programmers are rising up in the Linux mold, driven by personal interest or professional need for software to be better or cheaper or just different from what commercial companies are churning out. Venerable programs like Sendmail, which since the beginning of the Internet has relayed virtually all e-mail to its intended destination, was developed under an open-source model. More than half of the Web servers on the Internet now run on Apache, an open-source program started in 1995 by a group of Web masters unhappy with the performance of the options on the market. Some companies, like Red Hat, are actually paying programmers to do what they once did free. Donald Becker, for instance, is paid by NASA, which used Linux to build a cluster of personal computers that rank among the top 500 fastest in the world, for about one-tenth the price of what an exotic supercomputer would cost. More traditional software companies are also jumping on the bandwagon. In December, Sun agreed to make its popular Java source code available to developers who pay a license fee. The company is retaining PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit, as Torvalds has for Linux, the process of determining which new functions can be added to the language. Last winter, in a move much celebrated by open-source proponents, Netscape released the source code to its Navigator Web browser. Although the software was already free to customers, the company is gambling that opening its code to developers will give it an edge over Microsoft's competing browser, Explorer, which comes free with Windows. And America Online, which plans to acquire Netscape, has pledged to support its open-source initiatives. Even Microsoft, in its memo assessing open-source software, concedes that "Linux and other O.S.S. advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that O.S.S. software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. . . . The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing." But the corporations that are throwing their weight behind Linux and other open-source projects are, for the most part, counting on the desire of geeks to continue selflessly donating their time and expertise to the betterment of the world's software. Late last year in Atlanta at a Linux convention, which was impressively organized by an ad-hoc group of Linux fans, Eric Raymond, the open-source guru, elaborated on his notion of prestige as a motivating force. "None of my peers are impressed by what kind of car I have," he said with twinkling eyes. "They're impressed when I have a T-1 line in my house. This all goes back to evolutionary biology where we're all competing for prestige because we think it will get us babes." There was a pause, as the almost entirely male audience -- some of whom looked as if they hadn't started shaving -- considered the obvious implications of this observation. Finally, someone called out: "Is it working for anyone?" There came the resounding unanimous reply: "Nooo!" But maybe the word just has yet to get out. Torvalds, for his part, tends to absent himself from displays of Linux activism, but he might have been proud of the one organized by the Silicon Valley Linux User group in Palo Alto, Calif., in November. Microsoft was holding a party to celebrate the opening of its new software-development center. In a true geek protest, about 50 Linux stalwarts gathered to hand out Linux CD's to Microsoft's guests as they entered. Wearing penguin T-shirts bearing the slogan "Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow?" and carrying "Star Wars"-inspired signs that read, "Use the Source, Luke," the group gathered at a coffee shop and was about to head over to the party when two guys arrived from Microsoft. Apparently they had been monitoring the group's Web site. "What you guys are doing is touching a lot of people's hearts," one of them told the group. "We'd love to sit down and talk." The offers of pizza and beer were politely declined, at least until after the event. But it was something of a crowning moment. "Did you get that down?" one of the protesters wanted to know. "Microsoft wants to buy us a beer." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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