An awfully nice revolutionary
Linus Torvalds created Linux as a gift - and has forced us to ponder the nature of success, writes Fiona Harvey
Published: June 19 2001 18:25GMT | Last Updated: June 19 2001 19:06GMT
Just for Fun
Linus Torvalds and David Diamond
Texere
For adangerous revolutionary, Linus Torvalds is an awfully nice man. The computer genius who created Linux, the free operating system that in the past few years has grown to rival even Microsoft's Windows in corporate computing, comes across as an affable, charming nerd and a contented father and husband.
His very niceness, though, makes his achievement all the more puzzling. Even after 250 pages of detail on the hows and whys of the Linux operating system (the name is a mixture of Linus and Unix, an older system), it still seems incredible that just one Finn managed to assemble a ragged army of programmers to create a system used by most of the world's biggest companies.
Torvalds started building Linux in 1991 and realised that to make it good enough for use in big computer networks required more work than he could put in. In software companies, operating systems are built over many years by thousands of programmers. Using the internet, Torvalds invited people to write parts of the system. He acted as arbiter, deciding which parts would make it into the final version. All the programmers gave their work free. Why? Perhaps, the reader is forced to conclude, the title sums it up: they really did do it Just for Fun.
According to the book's subtitle, this is "The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary". We have grown so used to the profit motive, particularly in the greed-driven world of high technology, that the notion of creating something for nothing sadly does seem revolutionary.
If Linux were sold, it might generate millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for its inventors. So, we want to know, why not sell it?
Torvalds simply did not want to. That was never the point of his efforts. He wrote the operating system as a project, out of a desire to stretch himself, just to see what it would be like. He had been writing programs for years, on the primitive personal computers that delighted teenage boys throughout the 1980s. Creating Linux in 1991, using the model of the veteran Unix operating system that had been running big corporate computers for 20 years, was just a more advanced form of the tinkering he had been carrying on in his bedroom since the age of 11.
The irresistible comparison is with Microsoft - and between the laid-back, beer-drinking Torvalds and the ferociously driven Bill Gates. Gates dropped out of Harvard to seize the opportunity to create an operating system for International Business Machines' new PC. His move, in retrospect, showed genius - at least in timing - and his subsequent success owed everything to commercial instinct. Torvalds sloped through university until his late 20s, thanks to Finland's publicly funded higher education system.
The contrast lends itself to mythologising. In the game-obsessed world of the internet, Torvalds metamorphosed into the white knight, while Gates embodied the forces of darkness.
A series of ill-considered remarks by Microsoft executives only encouraged the myth. They suggested there might be something un-American about giving away software. The whiff of McCarthyism served to increase support for the freewheeling Linux movement.
In its insistence on the profit motive as a moral imperative, Microsoft was taking up a position in the contemporary liberal crisis over the morality of capitalist systems. It invited the same sort of antagonism as has been directed against trade in the recent anti-globalisation and anti-capitalism protests.
From that viewpoint, Torvalds' rejection of the profit motive clearly did make him a dangerous revolutionary but he was not the first - Richard Stallman, an American computer programmer, had been advocating for years before Linux that all software should be free. Stallman wrote the General Public Licence, which describes the terms under which software should be made available freely, making him a sort of Marx to Torvalds' Lenin.
Class war makes it in here, too. Unlike Gates, Torvalds was not born to affluence. Without bitterness, he describes the irony that: "One of my most distinct memories is of the times when my Mom would have to pawn her only investment - the single share in the Helsinki telephone company that you owned as part of having a telephone . . . Now I'm on the board of directors of the same company." (Like so many revolutionaries, Torvalds joins the bourgeoisie in the end.)
Torvalds' diffident charm and avoidance of publicity paradoxically helped to make him a media celebrity.
His genius, however, has its limits. Revolutionaries may change the world but the things they say about it are frequently infelicitous or banal. "It's easy to fight windmills if you don't realise how hard it is," the autobiography proclaims at one point. Torvalds enunciates throughout the book his theory of the meaning of life, essentially that after survival and social order, we strive only for entertainment - hence Linux and its genesis in "fun".
The book also suffers because of the sort of revolution Torvalds was fighting. Whereas political revolutionaries wage real and bloody war and plot the downfall of governments in smoke-filled rooms, computer revolutionaries sit at desks and figure out system calls and hardware interfaces. The struggle to release version 1.2 of the kernel was not 10 months that shook the world. Even the personality clashes along the way are muted, because Torvalds, after all, is a jolly nice man.
That is why the reader is led to ponder the real personality clash scarcely mentioned in this book: between Torvalds and Gates. Gates has undergone a careful makeover of his image. These days he is seeking to appear less of a scarily efficient nerd and more of a regular guy. Torvalds has just been himself. Gates' new look doesn't wash - he lacks the personality, the sincerity to carry it off. Torvalds, all goofy smile and incipient paunch, charms effortlessly. Though nerd to the core, he really is just a regular guy.
The difference between them is enjoyment. Torvalds' attitude is that one should not bother with things unless they are pleasurable. But it is impossible to imagine Gates doing anything "just for fun". That would be quite revolutionary.
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