So during the day, I worked for Transmeta. I wrote and maintained the “x86 interpreter” that we still use today (although others maintain it now). The interpreter is basically the piece of Transmeta software that looks at Intel instructions one at a time, and executes them (i.e., it “interprets” the language of the 80x86 architecture, one instruction at a time). I ended up doing other things later, but that’s how I got into the strange and wonderful world of hardware emulation.
During the night, I slept.
My deal with Transmeta was clear: I had been given vague assurances that I could work on Linux during work hours too. Trust me, I took full advantage of that.
A lot of people believe in working long days and doing double, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I’m not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night’s sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I’m a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that’s just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I’m standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you’re alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.
IV
Welcome to Silicon Valley. One of the first things I got to do upon landing in this strange galaxy was to meet the stars.
I received an email from Steve Jobs’s secretary about how he’d like to meet me and could I spare an hour or two. Not knowing what it was all about, I said sure.
The meeting was at Apple’s headquarters on Infinity Loop Drive. It was with Jobs and his chief technical guy, Avie Tevanian. This was when Apple was starting work on OS X, the Unix-based operating system that wasn’t released until September 2000. There wasn’t much formality to the meeting. Basically, Jobs started off by trying to tell me that on the desktop there were just two players, Microsoft and Apple, and that he thought that the best thing I could do for Linux was to get in bed with Apple and try to get the open source people behind Mac OS X.
I stuck around because I wanted to learn about the new operating system. It’s based on Mach, the microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University. In the mid-1990s the Mach was expected to be the ultimate operating system, and a lot of people were interested in it. In fact, IBM and Apple used Mach as the basis for their ill-fated Taligent joint-venture operating system.
Jobs made a big point of the fact that Mach’s low-level kernel is open source. He sort of played down the flaw in the setup: Who cares if the basic operating system, the real low-core stuff, is open source if you then have the Mac layer on top, which is not open source?
He had no way of knowing that my personal opinion of Mach is not very high. Frankly, I think it’s a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and managed to even make up a few of its own. One of the arguments against microkernels has always been performance. So a lot of people did research projects aimed at determining how to turn microkernels into something that performs really well. All of the resulting recommendations made it into Mach. As a result, it became a very complicated system with rules of its own. And it still doesn’t perform that well.
Avie Tevanian had been one of the Mach people when it was a university project. It was kind of interesting, discussing what he and Steve saw as the issues. At the same time, we disagreed fairly fundamentally on technical matters. I really didn’t think there was a reason for open source or Linux people to get involved. Sure, I could understand why they wanted to get more open source developers into their system; they were seeing the momentum build behind Linux. But I don’t think they were seeing it quite enough. I don’t think Jobs realized that Linux would potentially have more users than Apple, although it’s a very different user base. And I don’t think Steve would be quite as eager to dismiss Linux as a desktop system today as he was three years ago.
I explained why I didn’t like Mach. For understandable reasons that didn’t go over very well. They’d certainly heard the arguments before. Obviously, I was very set on Linux and Tevanian was very set on Mach. It was interesting to see how they discussed some of the technical issues. One of the immediate problems I could see involved how they planned on supporting old Mac applications in the new operating system. They wanted to do all the old stuff with a compatibility layer. All the old Mac applications would run within one new tacked-on process. But one of the major shortcomings of the old Mac is the lack of memory protection, and this solution does nothing to solve that problem. Only the new Mac applications would have memory protection. It didn’t make sense to me.
We had basic differences in how we viewed the world. Steve was Steve, exactly as the press portrays him. He was interested in his own goals, and especially the marketing side. I was interested in the technical side, and not very interested in either his goals or his arguments. His main argument was that if I wanted to get the desktop market I should come join forces with Apple. My reaction was: Why should I care? Why would I be interested in the Apple story? I didn’t think there was anything interesting in Apple. And my goal in life was not to take over the desktop market. (Sure, it’s going to happen, but it’s never been my goal.)
He didn’t use very many arguments. He just basically took it for granted that I would be interested. He was clueless, unable to imagine that there could be entire segments of the human race who weren’t the least bit concerned about increasing the Mac’s market share. I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had—or how big a market Microsoft has. And I can’t blame him for not knowing in advance how much I dislike Mach.
But even though I disagreed with almost everything he said, I kind of liked him.
Then there was the first time I met Bill Joy. I walked out on him.
Okay, to be fair, I didn’t realize who he was when I first met him. It was at the Jini preview. Jini is Sun Microsystems’ interaction agent language, an extension to Java. It’s for doing seamless networking between completely different systems. You could have a printer that was Jini-aware, and anything on the same network that spoke Jini would be able to use Jini automatically.
Sun Microsystems had invited me and about a dozen other open source people and technical people to a private preannouncement briefing that would take place in a hotel room in downtown San Jose during Java World. The reason we were invited: They were doing Jini under what, at Sun Microystems, passes for open source.
When I went there, I kind of knew Bill Joy was there. He had been the key person behind BSD Unix and later joined Sun as chief scientist. I had never met him before. He just came up to me and said he was Bill Joy and I kind of didn’t react to it. I hadn’t come there to meet him but to see what Sun thought about open source and how they were going to enter open source. A few minutes later, Bill himself was explaining the reasons for making it open source and they had a limited demonstration of the system.
Then they started explaining their licensing. It was horrible. Just stupid. Basically it boiled down to the fact that if somebody else wanted to use the system in even a half-commercial way, it wouldn’t be open source at all. I thought it was a completely idiotic idea. I was really upset about the fact that, on the invitation, they had touted their open-sourceness. It was open source in the sense that you could read the source, but if you wanted to make any modifications or make it part of your infrastructure, you had to license it from Sun. If somebody at Red Hat wanted to make the latest Red Hat CD version of Linux Jini-aware, the company would have to license the Jini technology from Sun.
I asked a few questions to see if l had understood it correctly.
Then I walked out on them.
I was just so pissed off that they had gotten people there by claiming open-sourceness that after I found out what it was all about I literally said, “Forget it, I’m not interested,” and left.
My understanding was that they wanted me there simply to inform me and that maybe if
I had been enthusiastic they would have liked a press quote or something. That plan backfired. But maybe they will learn. Apparently people later convinced them to open source their Star Office. So I guess it all just takes time.
I’m told that they continued the meeting that day and had dinner, and that everybody else stayed.
The second time I met Bill Joy turned out to be a much better experience. About a year and a half later he invited me out for sushi.
His secretary phoned me to set up a time. Bill lives and works in Colorado and apparently spends one week out of each month in Silicon Valley. We went to Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto. It’s one of the better sushi places in the Valley. Of course it’s nothing like Blowfish Sushi in San Francisco, with its nonstop Japanese animations to look at, or Tokyo Go Go in the Mission, with its hip crowd, or Sushi Ran in Sausalito, with its important patrons, or Seto Sushi in Sunnyvale, which has the best spicy tuna sushi of them all.
Okay, we were at Fuki Sushi, and it was kind of fun because Bill was trying to get real wasabi. I didn’t know this at the time, but in most Japanese restaurants in the United States, what passes for wasabi is actually just colored horseradish. It turns out the wasabi plant lives only in Japanese streams and is difficult to grow commercially. Bill tried to explain this to the waitress and she really didn’t get the concept. She was Japanese, but she thought that wasabi was wasabi. He asked her to ask the chefs.
The back-and-forth was sort of funny. This was a social dinner. He basically made it clear that if I wanted to work for Sun I could just give him the word and he would make something happen. But that was not the main thing. It was more of an opportunity to talk about the issues. He started reminiscing about how he’d been the maintainer of BSD Unix for five years and how he had grown to appreciate having the commercial side around him through Sun. He talked about how important it was to have the kind of commercial support that a company like Sun could provide. I found it fun and interesting to hear him talk about the early days of Unix. It didn’t make one bit of difference to me that we were never able to taste genuine wasabi. I distinctly remember thinking he was probably the nicest and most interesting of the high-profile people I had met in Silicon Valley.
Flash forward three years. I pick up Wired magazine only to encounter his horribly negative article about technology entitled “The Future Doesn’t Need Us.” I was kind of disappointed. Obviously, the future doesn’t need us. But he didn’t have to be so negative about it.
I don’t want to tear apart his article line by line, but I have a general belief that the saddest thing that could ever happen to humanity would be that we would just go on and on, as opposed to evolving. Bill seemed to feel that advances like genetic modification make us lose our humanity. Everybody always thinks that something different is inhuman because right now we are human. But as we continue to evolve with whatever happens, in 10,000 years we will not be human according to today’s standards. We will just be a different form of human.
In Bill’s article, he seemed afraid of that. My feeling is that it’s unnatural—and fruitless—to try and curb evolution. Instead of trying to find two different kinds of dog to produce the desired offspring, obviously we will resort to genetics; it seems inevitable that this will happen for people, too. In my opinion, changing the human race through genetics is preferable to leaving the status quo. I think that, in the bigger picture, it would be a hell of a lot more interesting to ensure the continued evolution of not just humans but of society, in whatever direction it goes. You can’t stop technology, and you can’t stop the advances we make in our knowledge of how our universe works and how humans are designed. It’s all moving so fast that some people, like Bill Joy, find it scary. But I see it as part of our natural evolution.
I disagree with Joy about how we should deal with the future the same way I disagreed with his notion of open source. I disagreed with Steve Jobs about technology. It sounds like I spent my first years in Silicon Valley being disagreeable, but that’s not true. I was doing a lot of coding and taking Patricia to the petting zoo and in general broadening my horizons—like learning the awful truth about wasabi.
V
Our overnight success.
Do you ever read advocacy newsgroups? The entire purpose of their existence is to advocate something, which means to put something else down. So if you go on them you find nothing but “My system is better than your system” nonsense. It’s its own form of online masturbation.
The reason I mention advocacy newsgroups is that, despite their absurdity, they do offer a clue to what is happening. So when corporations first decided that Linux was the darling of operating systems, the growing commercial support wasn’t discussed first in the press or at the checkout counter at Fry’s Electronics, but on advocacy newsgroups.
Let me back up. In the spring of 1998, a third blonde entered my world: Daniela Yolanda Torvalds got produced on April 16th, making her the first Torvalds to be a U.S. citizen. She and Patricia are sixteen months apart, the same as Sara and me. But I guarantee they won’t be as embattled as my sister and I were growing up—certainly not with Tove’s moderating influence. Or her karate skills.
Two weeks before Daniela’s birth, the open source community—which had until recently been called the free software community—got its biggest boost ever. That’s when Netscape opened up the source code for its browser technology in a project named Mozilla. On the one hand, the news got everyone on the newsgroups excited because it raised the visibility of open source. But it also made a lot of people, including me, fairly nervous. Netscape was in trouble at the time, thanks in large part to Microsoft, and the opening up of its browser was seen as a somewhat desperate measure. (Ironically, the browser’s roots were in open source. It began as a project at the University of Illinois.)
People on the newsgroups were expressing their fears that Netscape would muck things up and give open source a bad name. Now there would be two big-name open source projects—Netscape and Linux—and the reasoning was that if Netscape, the better known of the two, were to fail, the reputation would impact Linux, too.
And to a large degree, Netscape did fail. The company had trouble getting open source developers interested in the project for the longest time. It was just a huge body of code and the only people who could get into that code were Netscape people.
The project was somewhat doomed not only because of its size but also, because Netscape wasn’t able to make everything available as open source—only the development version, which was fairly broken at the time the company released it. The company couldn’t GPL the browser because not all the code was theirs—the Java portion was licensed from Sun, for example. Not everyone on the newsgroups agreed with Netscape’s license. On the whole, the license was fairly mellow, but if you’re someone like Richard Stallman you don’t like mellow.
I thought it was wonderful that Netscape took this step, but I didn’t view it as a personal achievement. I remember that Eric Raymond took it really personally. He was extremely happy about it. His paper, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which did an excellent job of explaining the open source philosophy and history, had been released the year before and was cited as one of the reasons behind the Netscape decision. He was actively pushing open source. He had been at Netscape on a number of occasions, trying to convince them to open up their browser. I was there only once. In fact, Eric had visited a number of companies bearing the open source message. I was interested in the technology, not the evangelization.
Within 24 hours of Mozilla being released, an Australian team that called itself the Mozilla Crypto Group created the cryptography module. Back then, non-U.S. citizens were prohibited from using encryption generated on U.S. soil. Suddenly, somebody from Australia had done the work, so non-U.S. citizens were in a position to use it. But there was a catch. Given the export restrictions of the time, the Mozilla project couldn’t take the Australian code. If it made its way to the United States, it couldn’t be reexported. This meant
that one of the first successes of the great Netscape experiment couldn’t become part of Mozilla.
We were all worried because Netscape had received a lot of news coverage. And for that first year, people walked on eggshells. Nobody wanted to say anything negative about Netscape for fear that it would result in bad press for open source and scare other companies away.
But two months after Netscape’s move, Sun Microsystems joined the game by declaring that it would become the first major hardware vendor to join Linux International. It would support Linux on its servers. The company with the unimpressive licensing scheme for its Jini project had decided that Linux was worth taking seriously. The newsgroups overflowed with selfcongratulations. With Sun on board, Linux developments made their way from Internet discussions to the trade press. Outsiders were suddenly interested, but mostly technical outsiders.
Then came IBM.
IBM has been known for being fairly stodgy, so everybody was taken by surprise when the company announced in June that it would sell and support Apache, the most popular commercial Linux version used for Web servers. You could run Apache on AIX, IBM’s UNIX, and that’s probably what a lot of people who bought IBM did. That’s how Apache got to IBM’s attention. Somebody must have noticed that most of those server machines ended up using Apache, so they calculated that they would sell more servers if they had the in-house expertise to support such customers. Or maybe they were acting on feedback from customers who said they would buy IBM machines but would run Apache.
It’s relatively easy to install Linux on a computer. But for most companies, one of the big issues, historically, has been: Who do we blame when something goes wrong? Obviously, there are the Linux companies like Red Hat that provide the support, but it was a psychological advantage for customers to know that IBM would be there for them. When IBM started getting into open source, a lot of people suspected it was just lip service. But that turned out not to be the case. IBM dipped its toes in the water by running and supporting Linux on its server boxes and then sort of waded all the way in. Next came the small PC servers. Then, the regular PCs. Then, the laptops. The company has announced it will spend $1 billion on Linux this year.
Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Page 15
