Re: That's where Americans are kicking Europe's butt. Its why the Neuer Market has all but failed in Germany.
The Bill Gates vs Linus Torvalds story epitomizes the gap between the US and European business cultures:
Linus Torvalds
Engineer , and Creator of the Linux Computer Operating System
He could have been as rich as Bill Gates, with his revolutionary computer operating system. But Linus Torvalds believes there's more to life than money says David Thomas
BOTH Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds are sandy-haired, bespectacled, geeky individuals whose appalling dress-sense has been only marginally mitigated by marriage. Both were instrumental in the creation of operating systems - the software packages that turn a computer from an inanimate box into a functioning machine. Both have become global leaders of the technological revolution. But that's where the similarities end. For Gates was an American student of business and law, from a wealthy background, who had a brilliant entrepreneurial idea.
One man and his penguin: Linus Torvalds and the Linux penguin
He perceived, before anyone else, that computer software (the programs) would become far more valuable than hardware (the boxes). He and his partners at Microsoft created a system called MS-DOS, which evolved into Windows, and made the majority of the world's personal computers dependent on it. By keeping the inner 'source-codes' that governed their system secret, they prevented anyone else copying what they had done. They used their market dominance to crush competitors and extract vast revenues from customers who had no option but to pay for their products. Gates became mind-bendingly rich.
He also became admired, feared and, in certain quarters, hated for his crushing domination of the computer world. Torvalds, on the other hand, was a Finnish student from a middle-class but impecunious family, who created a revolution in computer operating systems almost by accident, when trying to make his own PC talk to the computer at his university. In his new book, Just For Fun, the Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, he describes how - putting everything he did directly into the public domain via the internet - he sat in his tiny Helsinki bedroom developing an operating-system called Linux, which just about any computer-user, on any machine, could use if they wanted to.
By making the source-codes for Linux public - known in computing as open source - Torvalds enabled other computer geeks to suggest improvements to the system. He also allowed companies to develop and sell Linux-based products, for free. Linux slowly got better and better and appeared in more and more applications. Unless you are a computer nerd, you probably do not have Linux on your desktop. But if your internet ISP has IBM servers, chances are that they will be using Linux.
The computer giant has embraced Linux wholeheartedly (as, incidentally, have Hewlett-Packard and Dell), spending millions of dollars on a US advertising campaign to celebrate the fact, and now believes that its decision to use Linux was responsible for a massive leap in server sales last year. The computer-cartoon film Shrek, which is proving a massive hit in America, was made with Linux-using computers - George Lucas uses it, too. The Chinese postal service uses Linux, as does Japan's biggest grocery chain.
Academics in South America believe that because Linux can be downloaded for free, it holds the key to getting the poor online. Even America's ultra-secretive National Security Administration has got in on the act, with a million-dollar project aimed at creating a more secure version of Linux, called SELinux. Now, in the spirit of open source, the NSA is making its SELinux code public. 'This is very unusual,' commented a nervous spokes-spook. 'It's a paradigm shift for the NSA.' Yes, but it's standard practice for Linux. Thousands, even millions of people have participated in the growth of Linux from its beginnings as a personal project in 1991, through its public launch in March 1994, to where it is today. As Torvalds himself puts it, 'What started out in my messy bedroom has grown to be the largest collaborative project in the history of the world.'
But Torvalds is not a billionaire, nor anywhere remotely near it. At 31, he is a junior software engineer at a Californian company called Transmeta. He, his wife Tove and their daughters, Patricia and Daniela, live in a large house in an exclusive development south of San Francisco. The house has a games-room, a hot-tub and five bathrooms. Linus drives a BMW Z3 sportscar. So Torvalds is not poor. But he is so much less rich than he could be, that his apparent indifference to great wealth has become a touchstone that separates the world of computing and telecommunications into two utterly distinct camps.
To business-people, Torvalds is a patsy who doesn't know his own value. But to computer geeks and ideologues, Torvalds has become a near-mythical figure. If Microsoft is the Evil Empire and Bill Gates its Darth Vader, then he is a real-life Obi-Wan Kenobi, part guru, part guerrilla fighter. Both Gates and Torvalds are respected, but in very different ways. If Gates is hated, Torvalds is loved. While Gates is paid, Torvalds is thanked. And so the question that arises is simple: is Torvalds a genius, or a schmuck? Has he missed out on one of the world's great goldmines, or found something more valuable than money? And one more question while we're at it: what kind of a man starts a revolution for free these days, anyway?
Torvalds himself is keen to play down the saintlier aspects of his public persona. 'People take me too seriously,' he says. 'I often get the feeling that they expect me to be some latter-day monk, living a frugal life in solitude. But money isn't such a bad thing to have as a reward for hard work.' He's well aware, though, that it is precisely his lack of mega-millions that is the root of his favourable image.
'A big part of my appeal was that I'm not Bill Gates. Journalists seemed to love the fact that, while Gates lived in a high-tech lakeside mansion, I was tripping over my daughters' playthings in a three-bedroom ranch house with bad plumbing.' Torvalds has shied away from any overt, posturing opposition to Microsoft, but his book is full of sly digs at the software Goliath: 'I didn't have to stand on a soapbox and say horrible things about Microsoft... Events just play themselves out and they played themselves out in favour of Linux... Microsoft's strategy is ultimately doomed to fail... The weeds will overrun those tidy green buildings in Redmond [Microsoft HQ] someday... Open source developers strive to earn the esteem of their peers. Bill Gates doesn't understand this... ' and so on.
For its part, Microsoft seems uncertain how to respond. In January, the company's chief executive, Steve Ballmer gave a presentation to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the giant American financial institution, at which he described Linux as 'threat number one' to Microsoft. 'You have to rate competitors that threaten your core higher than competitors you're trying to take from,' he said. 'So that puts the Linux phenomenon at the top of the list.'
Four weeks later, however, another Microsoft executive, Doug Miller, was claiming that Linux was doomed, and that many Linux-based businesses would be in trouble before the year was out. 'There really isn't much value in [being] free,' he said. 'Free does not sustain a business. Development costs money, quality costs money, support costs money. We have yet to see a Linux business model that has any chance of long-term success.' The combination of bluster and fear suggests that Goliath is getting nervous. But who precisely is the David throwing stones?
Linus Torvalds comes from the Swedish-speaking community that forms five per cent of the Finnish population. Both his parents are journalists and both are radical. They divorced when Torvalds was a small boy and he and his sister Sara spent their childhood shuttling - either singly or together - between their parents' various domestic arrangements. Torvalds's father, Nicke, was a committed Communist who studied in Moscow and was politically active in Finland.
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engology.com
GUEST COMMENTARY
By Russ Roberts
Why Linux Is Wealthier Than Microsoft
Linus Torvalds can muster more creativity from his far-flung rank and file than Bill Gates can from his corporate monolith
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