February 21, 1999
The Rebel Code
By AMY HARMON
ne 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."
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."
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."
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."
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or
availability.
The Linux Organization
Microsoft
Linus Torvalds Documentation Project
Torvalds pronounces "Linux"
Red Hat Software
Free Software Foundation
Richard Stallman's home page
"Why Software Should Not Have Owners," article by Richard Stallman
Eric Raymond's home page
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar," article by Eric Raymond
Sendmail.org
Apache.org
Silicon Valley Linux User Group, organizers of the "Silicon Valley Tea Party"
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