With the recent discussion of the disability news database on a Linux
system, here's an update of the Linux revolution. This one isn't being
televised.
kelly
from the New York times
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."
I t 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."
W hether 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."
B ut 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."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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