Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  Somebody coined the phrase “Benevolent Dictator” to describe how I ran the whole thing. The first time I heard the term, all I could think of was some sunny-nation general with a dark mustache handing out bananas to his starving masses. I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the Benevolent Dictator image. I control the Linux kernel, the foundation of it all, because, so far, everybody connected with Linux trusts me more than they trust anyone else. My method for managing the project with hundreds of thousands of developers is the same as it was when I coded away in my bedroom: I don’t proactively delegate as much as I wait for people to come forward and volunteer to take over things. It started when I divested myself of the responsibilities I found less interesting, like the user-level code. People stepped forward and offered to take over the subsystems. Everything filters up to me through the maintainers of those subsystems.

  I approve or disapprove of their work, but mostly I let things happen naturally. If two people are maintaining similar kinds of things, I accept both of them to see which gets used. Sometimes they both get used but wind up taking different paths. Once, there was intense competition between two people who insisted on sending patches that fought each other’s patches. I refused to accept patches from either, until one of the developers lost interest. That’s how King Solomon would have handled things if he ran a preschool.

  Benevolent dictator? No, I’m just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That’s when you get the best results.

  My approach made headlines.

  But the irony here is that while my Linux management style, such as it is, was earning high marks in the press, I was an undeniable failure during my brief stint as a manager at Transmeta. At one point, it was decided that I should manage a team of developers. I flopped. As anyone who has ventured into my junk heap of an office knows, I’m totally disorganized. I had trouble managing the weekly progress meetings, the performance reviews, the action items. After three months it became obvious that my management style wasn’t doing anything to help Transmeta, despite the praise I was getting from journalists for the way I was running Linux.

  Meanwhile, the press kept pounding away at another issue: fragmentation. Those who have followed the rocky, unhappy history of Unix know about the endless bickering between Unix vendors. The question came up all the time in 1998: Would history repeat itself in the world of Linux? My answer was always that while there undoubtedly is bickering among Linux vendors, it can’t lead to the fragmentation that has kept Unix a perennial almost-been. The problem with Unix is that competing vendors wasted years implementing similar features, simply because they didn’t have access to the same source base. Developing the same features independently not only cost Unix years but it also led to bloody infighting. Sure, I would tell the press, Linux vendors don’t host regularly scheduled Love-Ins. But there is and will continue to be less fragmentation inside the Linux community than in the Unix community, because even Linux vendors who are not friendly can see the same source base and can reuse each other’s work. The source code is a repository from which anyone can draw.

  The more journalists started grasping such concepts, the more I liked meeting them. (Unlike the journalists I remember from my youth in Helsinki, most of them in the United States in the 1990s were sober.) I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to debate with them.

  But speaking was another matter entirely. I’m not what you’d call a natural performer. Remember: I’m the fellow who barely left his bedroom throughout his childhood. I never was very good at even writing speeches, so I always waited until the night before an event to prepare.

  Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. Typically, I would step out to the podium and people would rise to their feet and applaud even before I opened my mouth. I don’t want to sound unappreciative, but I’ve always found that to be an embarrassing situation. Anything you say sounds wrong, even my standard, “Thanks, Now Please Sit Down.” I’m open to suggestions.

  But not all the calls were from journalists or conference organizers. One night I was sitting at home with Tove. We were reading to the girls. The phone rang.

  I answered: “Torvalds.”

  “Uh. Is this the Linux guy?”

  “Yes.”

  Two seconds of silence. Click.

  Another night a fellow from Las Vegas phoned me at home, trying to get me to sign on with some Linux T-shirt business.

  The obvious solution would have been to get an unlisted phone number. I didn’t bother to do that when we first moved to California because it was more expensive than having a listed number. I’ve since learned the price you pay for being so frugal, and am now unlisted. Once, before I got de-listed, David misplaced my home number and phoned directory assistance. He asked for my number, and the operator who provided it said with great astonishment, “He’s listed? With all his millions?”

  But no, there weren’t millions. Millions of Linux users, sure. Not millions of dollars for Linus.

  And that was perfectly fine.

  VII

  Most days I wake up thinking I’m the luckiest bastard alive. I don’t remember if Wednesday, August 11, 1999 was one of those days, but it should have been.

  It was the second day of the Linux World convention and trade show which had been taking place at the San Jose Convention Center. Dirk Hohndel, who is CEO of SuSE and traveled from Germany for the trade show, had spent the night on the guest bed in our family room. I’ve known him for years. He’s one of the old XFree86 people, and is on the graphics side of Linux. He’s also Daniela’s godfather. I woke up, made cappuccino for Tove and Dirk, read everything in the San Jose Mercury News except the sports pages and the classified ads—like I always do—and then we piled into the Toyota Rav4 for the ten-mile trip to downtown San Jose.

  I remember shaking a lot of hands.

  This was the day that Red Hat would be going public. The company had years earlier given me stock options, and had only recently sent me some paperwork that I never bothered to look at. It sat somewhere in a stack of papers near my computer. I remember I really wanted Red Hat to do well. It wasn’t so much a matter of being excited about the options—I didn’t quite realize what they meant. I was extremely jazzed for another reason. In many respects, the IPO’s success would be a validation of Linux. So I was a bit nervous that morning, but I wasn’t the only one. The market had been doing poorly for weeks, and people wondered whether or not Red Hat would even pull off its IPO.

  The “liquidity event” did, in fact, happen. We got word on the conference floor that Red Hat’s initial public offering came in at $15. Or was it $18? I don’t remember. The important thing was that it ended the first day of trading at $35. Nothing record-breaking, but it was okay.

  I remember driving home with Tove and Dirk in the car, first feeling relieved. Then, when I thought about the money, growing excited. Only when we were stuck in Northbound traffic on Highway 101 did it strike me that in one day I had gone from basically zero to half a million dollars. My heart started beating faster. It was elation tempered with disbelief.

  I was clueless about stock and decided I needed to find out what to do next. So I phoned Larry Augustin, VA Linux’s CEO. I told him he was the only person I knew who had a clue about how stock works. My exact words: “Do you have like a stockbroker or somebody that you trust because I don’t want to go on eBay?”

  Red Hat had given me options—not an outright grant of stock. I didn’t know what to do about exercising them. I knew there might be a lockup period but I didn’t know if it applied to me, and I hadn’t thought about the tax consequences. Larry, who is good at this sort of thing and who knows a lot of people, got me in touch with this guy at Lehman Brothers, who shouldn’t have been handling me at all because I wasn’t a big customer. He promised to find out what I should do. Meanwhile, two days after the IPO, I got an email from someone in Red Hat’s Human Resources Department, or their lawyer, in which they mentioned something about the sto
ck having split before the IPO. I knew nothing about it. So I tracked down the manila envelope containing all the stock option paperwork I had never bothered to read, and there it was, in plain (for legalese) English: My options had magically doubled.

  My half-million dollars was actually a million dollars!

  Regardless of the image that has caught on in the press, of me as a selfless geek-for-the-masses living under a vow of poverty, I was, frankly, delirious.

  There, I said it.

  I sat down and read all the Red Hat papers. Yes, I was subject to a 180-day lockup.

  Do you have any idea how long 180 days can be when you’re a first-time millionaire on paper?

  Now I had a new sport (or a sport, period): keeping track of Red Hat’s stock price, which continued escalating during the following six months. It went up gradually and jumped a few times and just grew and grew. At one point, Red Hat even split once more. At best, I was worth $5 million from the options.

  Red Hat started relatively low and inched skyward as Wall Street, in the throes of its love affair with anything even remotely related to the Internet, “discovered” Linux. We were the Flavor of the Month during the cold-weather months at the end of 1999. Investment pundits on television and in the general press couldn’t get enough of this crazy little operating system that was promising to upend Microsoft. My phone rang constantly. It all reached a stunning climax with the VA Linux IPO on December 9th. That was an endorsement beyond anyone’s expectation.

  Larry Augustin and I went up to San Francisco to be on site at the offices of First Boston Credit Suisse for the IPO. I was wearing what I always wear: a freebie T-shirt and sandals. We brought our wives and kids. It was a crazy scene with the toddlers running around among the buttoned-down investment bankers.

  It all happened so suddenly. Figures streamed across monitors indicating that VA Linux, on the first day of trading, was selling in the $300-a-share range. This was unheard of. Even if we hadn’t seen the figures, we would have known it was a record because of the way the investment bankers were hypnotized by CNN and the Bloomberg financial channel. For his part, Larry was his usual cool self. I don’t think he batted an eyelash during the whole thing. I wouldn’t know for sure, because I was busy chasing after my daughters.

  Even the dwellers of Madagascar’s rainforests probably were aware of how rich it all made Larry. He had driven up to San Francisco without much of a financial net worth, and drove back to Silicon Valley worth something on the order of $1.6 billion. And, as the press continually pointed out, he was still in his twenties.

  For my part, I had been given a stock grant and options for shares in VA Linux. As with Red Hat, I couldn’t sell shares for six months. But unlike Red Hat, which climbed steadily, VA Linux had nowhere to go but down. After its record-setting opening day, the stock dropped steadily for a year, reaching a low point of 6.62. Partly, the stock was a victim of the market correction that hurt most technology stocks that April. But also, Linux’s stint as Flavor of the Month had ended with the spring thaw. Because of the VA Linux lockup period, I couldn’t take advantage of the hyper market while it lasted. It was psychologically much harder to follow the company than it had been to follow Red Hat, to know that every night when I crawled into bed, I would wake up with a lessened financial net worth.

  But I still felt like the luckiest bastard alive.

  Linus drives up to my Sausalito office one evening in January. After snickering about my use of a Macintosh and a non-Linux operating system, he sits down to read the first draft of a lengthy preface I have written, which is in the first person, from his perspective. I sit maybe two inches away. The only noise Linus makes is when he trips over a line about how he never expected to find himself the only global superstar Finland has produced other than Jean Sibelius and Nikki the Reindeer. After maybe ten minutes, he finishes the preface and his only comment is: “Boy, you write long sentences.” We spend a couple of hours making the sentences shorter and changing some of the language to words that he would actually use, and learning how to collaborate at work, having already proven that we are champs at goofing off collaboratively. We eventually ditched that preface.

  Then Linus attempts, unsuccessfully, to improve the resolution on my flat screen. It was last year’s state-of-the-art computer screen, and I thought of it as something of a status symbol. “How can you read from this thing?’” he asks. He is unsuccessful at improving the resolution quality to meet his standards. Then he takes out a piece of paper and starts drawing diagrams and explaining how monitors work. At some point I say, “Hey, let’s grab some sushi.”

  “This money thing is driving me crazy,” he says.’ Just the waiting for the lock-up period to end. It’s like having lots of money but not having lots of money. It’s on my mind constantly.’”

  I order saki. He orders fruit-juice because he is driving.

  “Up until now, we almost never had more than $5,000 in our checking account. Except for some stocks and stuff we have for savings that we can’t touch, that was all the money we had to spend. So now I have all this money on paper and—”

  “Like how much money? A couple of million?”

  “How about $20 million? That’s what the stock from the VA Linux IPO is worth, as long as it doesn’t drop. But I don’t have access to the money until the lock-up period in six months. No, now it’s five months.”

  “I don’t see the problem here. You have to wait five months before buying a big house? I don’t mean to be unsympathetic but…”

  “Hey, well it seems at first that it’s enough money that we should be able to buy any house we want. But we need a house with five bedrooms and we want enough land around the house so we can hear animals and I’ve been playing pool everyday at work so we’ll need a room that’s big enough to hold a pool table. And we want a separate unit for when Tove’s parents visit, or so we can have my sister’s friends come from Finland and stay a few months and help us with the kids. It’s funny, we had Patricia when we moved from Finland to the states. We had Daniela when we moved from our apartment to the duplex, and…”

  “So you guys are working on having another kid?”

  “Well, we’re letting things happen naturally.”

  “Where I come from, you pronounce that, ‘We’re trying to have another kid,’ dude.”

  “Okay. So we’ll need more space and we’ve gone to a couple of Open Houses and the houses available are unbelievably expensive. I mean you get $20 million and its like, wow, I can afford any house in the world. But we looked at a house for $7.2 million in Woodside that had no land and was really trashy. The best house we saw was for $5 million. But if you have $20 million, you’ve gotta figure that half of that goes to taxes. Then you have $70 million to work with, but the taxes on a house like that could be like $60,000 a year, so you’ve got to set money aside for that. And I don’t know. This is going to be the only time in my life when I’ll get so much money and I don’t want to overextend myself and not be able to afford to live in the house. And we don’t want to have a mortgage hanging over our heads.”

  “I’m not feeling sorry for you. First of all, you’ll probably do okay if Transmeta does okay in an IPO.”

  “Yeah. But I’m only a junior engineer, so I’m not getting that much stock. And my salary isn’t that high.”

  “Linus, you could go to any venture capitalist in this town and get anything you wanted…”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  VIII

  This is the place where I slip in my golden rules. Number One is: “Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” If you follow that rule, you’ll always know how to behave in any situation. Number Two is: “Be proud of what you do.” Number Three: “And have fun doing it.”

  Of course, it’s not always easy to be proud and have fun. A month before the VA Linux IPO, I accomplished neither when I delivered a keynote speech at the 1999 Comdex Show in Las Vegas. Comdex, as most everyone knows, is the biggest, badde
st trade show known to humanity. For most of a week, the sleepy town of Las Vegas, Nevada, becomes a magnet for every conceivable high-tech product that could possibly be peddled and the masses of people who would buy and sell them. It’s the only time of the year when you can roll down the window of a Las Vegas cab, lean out, and ask a random hooker strutting past: “What time is the keynote?”—and she’ll know the answer.

  It was a big deal that the trade show organizers asked the benevolent dictator of Planet Linux to give a Comdex keynote speech. It was the computer industry’s way of acknowledging that Linux was a force with which to be reckoned.

  Bill Gates delivered the keynote on Sunday, the first night of the show. He had attracted a standing-room crowd in the Venetian Hotel ballroom, which is about the size of seven average IKEA stores. Conference-goers who were eager to hear what he had to say about the antitrust trial—which was happening at the time—or who just wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren they had seen the world’s richest man in the flesh, lined up hours beforehand in a snake pattern in the Hotel conference center’s massive basement level. Gates’s speech began with a lawyer joke, then included well-choreographed demonstrations of Microsoft Web technology and highly polished video segments, one of them with Gates dressed like and imitating Austin Powers—that sent the audience into fits of laughter.

  I wasn’t there. I was helping Tove shop for a bathing suit.