Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  Then, of course, there was the incident in North Carolina. Guds! That was bad. A recently published book about Red Hat made it sound like an international incident of potentially catastrophic proportions. It wasn’t really much.

  I had been invited to speak at a meeting of Linux users hosted by Red Hat, which is based in Durham. The auditorium was packed. The moment I walked out onto the stage, everybody rose to their feet and started cheering. The first words out of my mouth were the first thing that came to mind:

  “I am your God.”

  It was meant to be a joke, for citing out loud!

  It wasn’t, “I really am convinced that I am your God and you should never forget it.” It was: “Okay, okay, okay. I know I’m your God. Now please just sit down and hold your appreciation until after you actually hear what I have to say, although I genuinely do appreciate your preemptive appreciation.”

  I can’t believe I’m willingly reliving this.

  After my four-word greeting, everyone was silent for a moment. Hours later, those four words had become the topic of newsgroup postings. I admit it: It was tasteless, but unintentionally tasteless. Actually, it was probably my way of dealing with the embarrassment of having people stand up and applaud you just because you step out to the speaker’s podium.

  People take me too seriously. They take a lot of things too seriously. And one lesson I’ve learned from my years as Linux’s hood ornament is that there’s something worse: Some folks can’t be content to just take things too seriously on their own. They’re not happy unless they convince others to go along with their obsession. This has become one of my major pet peeves in life.

  Have you ever stopped to think why dogs love humans so much? No, it’s not because their owners take them to the groomers every six weeks and occasionally pick up what they leave behind on the sidewalk. It’s because dogs love getting told what to do. It gives them a reason to live. (This is particularly important since so many of them are out of work—spayed or neutered, which means they’ve been laid off from their job as reproducers of new generations of canines. Also, with a few exceptions, there isn’t much call for their wired-in jobs, like sniffing out rodents.) As a human, you’re the leader of the pack and you’re telling the dogs how they should behave. Following your orders is their passion. And they like it.

  Unfortunately, that’s how humans are built, too. People want to have somebody tell them what to do. It’s in our kernel. Any social animal has to be that way.

  It doesn’t mean you’re subservient. It just means that you are likely to go along with others when they tell you what to do.

  Then there are people with individual ideas, folks who have convictions in certain areas to the degree that they say, “No, I won’t go along.” And these people become leaders. It’s easy to become a leader. (It has to be. I became one, right?) Then, other people who don’t have convictions in those areas are more than happy to let these leaders make their decisions for them and tell them what to do.

  It’s absolutely the right of any human being to do what they’re told by someone they choose as a leader. I’m not arguing against that, although I find that part depressing. However, what I find to be unacceptable is when people, either leaders or followers, then try to impose their own world views on others. That’s not just depressing—it’s scary. It’s depressing that people will follow just about anyone, including me. And it’s scary that people will then want to impose their followingness—if that’s a word—on others, including me.

  Forget the clean-cut robot/proselytizers who always seem to bang on your door whenever you’re on the computer, concentrating on a tricky technical problem, or whenever the kids are finally napping and you’re just starting to get amorous. A more relevant example is close at hand in the open source community: the zealots who believe that every innovation should be licensed under the GPL (“GPL’d” in hacker parlance.) Richard Stallman wants to make everything open source. To him, it’s a political struggle, and he wants to use the GPL as a way to drive open source. He sees no other alternative. The truth is, I didn’t open source Linux for such lofty reasons. I wanted feedback. And it’s how things were done in the early days of computers, when most of the work was done at universities or defense establishments and they ended up being very open. You gave your source away to another university when people asked for it. What Richard did, after getting cut off from projects he loved, was to be the first person to consciously open source.

  Yes, there are enormous benefits to be gained by opening up one’s technology and making it available under the same terms as Linux and a host of other innovations. To get a glimpse of those benefits, all you have to do is just look at the comparatively low standards of quality of any closed software project. The GPL and open source model allows for the creation of the best technology. It’s that simple. It also prevents the hoarding of technology and ensures that anyone with an interest in a project or technology won’t be excluded from its development.

  This is not a minor point. Stallman, who deserves a monument in his honor for giving birth to the GPL, was inspired to jump-start the free software phenomenon mainly because he was shut out of a succession of interesting development projects when they moved from the open, academic world of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the proprietary corporate environment. The most notable of these was the LISP machine. LISP started out as part of the artificial intelligence community. As with many things, somebody thought it was so good that they should form a startup to make it a commercial success and make money on it. This happens all the time at universities. But Richard wasn’t part of the commercial crowd, so when LISP became a commercial project under a company named Symbolics in 1981, suddenly he was cut off. To add insult to injury, Symbolics hired away many of his cohorts from the AI lab.

  The same thing happened to him a few other times. The way I understand it, his motivation for promoting open source was not so much anticommercial as it was antiexclusion. For him, open source is about not getting left out. It’s about being able to continue working on a project regardless of who makes it commercial.

  The GPL is wonderful in its gift of letting anyone play. Just think about what a major advance for humanity that is! But does that mean that every innovation should be GPL’d?

  No way! This is the abortion issue of technology. It should be up to the individual innovator to decide for herself or himself whether to GPL the project or to use a more conventional approach to copyright. The thing that drives me crazy about Richard is that he sees everything in black and white. And that creates unnecessary political divisions. He never understands the viewpoint of anybody else. If he were into religion, you would call him a religious fanatic.

  In fact, the most annoying thing—second only to religious enthusiasts knocking on my door saying what I should believe in—is people knocking on my door (or bombarding me with email) saying how I should license my software. This should not be a political issue. People should be able to make up their own minds. It’s one thing to suggest to someone that they consider GPLing their software, and then leaving it at that. It’s another thing to argue the point. It’s really bad when people complain about the fact that I work for a commercial company that doesn’t GPL everything it does. I tell them it’s not their business.

  The thing I find hugely irritating about Richard is not that he believes that Linux—because its kernel relied on applications from the gnu software project—should more rightly be called “gnu/Linux.” It is not that he openly resents me for being a poster boy for open source even though he was sharing code while I was still sleeping in a laundry basket. No, the reason I find him so pesty is that he continually complains about other people not using the GPL.

  I admire Richard from afar for a bunch of reasons. And I guess I tend to respect people, like Richard, who have very strong moral opinions. But why can’t they keep these opinions to themselves? The thing I dislike the most is when people tell me what I should or should not do.
I absolutely despise people who think they have any say over my personal decisions. (Except, perhaps, my wife.)

  Over the course of the development of Linux, pundits such as Eric Raymond have suggested that the operating system’s success and the longevity of open source development have partly hinged on my pragmatic approach and my ability to keep from taking sides in disputes. While Eric is arguably the best articulator of the open-source phenomenon (and while I strongly, strongly disagree with his pro-gun sentiments), I believe he’s a bit off the mark on his perception of me. It’s not that I keep from taking sides. It’s just that I so strongly resent anyone who tries to impose his or her morals on others. You can replace the word, “morals” with “religion,” “computing preferences,” whatever.

  Just as imposing morals is wrong, the next step—institutionalizing morals—is doubly wrong. I’m a big believer in individual choice, which means that I think I should make my own decisions when it comes to moral issues.

  I want to decide for myself. I’m very much against unnecessary rules imposed by society. I’m a big believer that you should be able to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home as long as you don’t hurt anybody else. Any law saying otherwise is a very, very broken law. And there are laws that say otherwise. I find some scary rules, especially some that are imposed on schools and children. Imagine even thinking of imposing rules about teaching evolution, and taking that into the wrong direction. That I find scary. This is social conscience rearing its ugly head in places it really has nothing at all to do with.

  At the same time, my personal belief is that what is more important than me and my individual moral decisions is, not even the human race, but evolution. To that extent, I want my individual choices to take social issues into account. But that’s probably built in. I think it is built into human biology—evolution—that we do take social things into account. Otherwise we’d have been gone long ago.

  The only other thing worth ranting about: people who are too preachy. There’s just no reason for folks to evangelize, and to be so self-righteous about it.

  And I’m sounding just like one of them.

  But it’s an easy trap when people start taking you far too seriously.

  XI

  Americans make a big fuss over March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day), May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), and October 12th (Columbus Day), but hardly any attention is paid to December 6th, which as any Finn can tell you is Finnish Independence Day.

  Most folks in Finland celebrate Finnish Independence Day the way they celebrate everything else, by partying to excess. They party-to-excess—even by Finnish standards—the night before and recover in front of the television set for almost the entire national holiday. The option, I guess, is to go out and trudge in the snow hung over.

  What keeps everyone glued to their TV sets is a single event: the President’s Ball. Finland doesn’t have much in the way of high society so the President’s Ball is pretty much it, the only truly big society event. It’s televised nationally to keep people from driving with hangovers and to prove to ourselves that we can stage our own respectable version of the Academy Awards. No, a better metaphor: It’s the Super Bowl of Finnish high society.

  So throughout the day, from Utsjoki in the north to Hanko in the south, Finns munch on gravlax and aspirin as they watch a procession of invitees—men in tailcoats and women in outrageous (for Scandinavia) evening attire—shake hands with the president.

  Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine was the year I got invited.

  You automatically get invited if you’re an ambassador to Finland or if you’re part of the Finnish parliament. Maybe one hundred or two hundred random people are invited on various grounds. They may have won a medal in the Olympics or maybe they helped the president on his campaign. If you are the captain of the ice hockey team and you’ve just won the world championship, you get invited. If the operating system you created gains worldwide attention, you get an invitation. Spouses and companions come, too.

  In fact, it was lucky that Tove and I could go at all. In August we had applied to the INS for permission to go to Finland and return. We weren’t approved until early November. Two weeks later we received our invitation to the President’s Ball.

  Now imagine what it’s like. Picture 2,000 Finns—and not even the most important 2,000 Finns—packed into the president’s castle. It was a home that had been built for a Russian merchant. It really is just a large home, not exactly a one-family home but maybe a home for one family that has a lot of support—cooks, maids, and the like. It’s not a huge place.

  So you arrive. Someone takes your coat and then you’re just jammed in there. You don’t know where to go. Bowls of punch proliferate. Obviously, they contain vodka. This wouldn’t be Finland if they didn’t. It basically takes a while to find people to talk to. You end up speaking to journalists, because, frankly, they’re the most interesting people there. (Maybe it was the punch that made them seem more interesting than a parliament member from, say, Lahti.)

  I didn’t expect it to be much fun, because I wouldn’t know many people there. I was the only one from the open source crowd invited. I expected it to be like the army—more enjoyable to talk about later. But it actually was fun.

  Tove wore a green gown that would have been stunning and attracted media attention even if we were at the Oscars, not the Finnish President’s Ball. Because she looked so good, and because Finland hadn’t won the world ice hockey championship that year, the press dubbed us King and Queen of the Ball.

  Whatever.

  “You enter this house not as a journalist but as a friend. We are allowing no journalists in this house.”

  I had never seen Tove so ebullient. She greeted me at the door of the new house on the day she and Linus received the key. It’s one of those monster homes: the Media Room (which now houses Linus’s pool table) probably doesn’t share a zip code with the Super Bonus Room, where Patricia and Daniela sleep, although it could handle an entire preschool. From the front door there’s a wide, long angled hallway leading way back to the family room. If they remove the fancy Italian tiles, it will be a great place for the girls to practice skateboarding some day. Linus’s office on the first floor has a mirrored sliding-glass door. Five bathrooms. Maybe they’ve found more of them by now. It’s all in a gated community far front the heart of Silicon Valley.

  Nicke Torvalds is visiting. Father and son return from a trip to the old duplex in a rented BMW Z3. It’s the model Linus will soon be purchasing, and Nicke will drive it to the Stanford University library this afternoon. But first, he leans against the hot tub, situated in the unlandscaped backyard, and announces that this is the largest house anyone named Torvalds has ever owned. Then he takes a piece of paper and lists all twenty Torvaldses. He didn’t know that a twenty-first was on its way.

  Linus, too, is thrilled in the empty house. Nicke videotapes the surroundings and I ask Linus to carry Tove across the threshold so I can photograph the event. There’s some very un-Finnish public displaying of affection.

  “Did you ever think our house would be this big?” Tove asks me.

  Tove needed to be on hand at the opening of the Ikea store in Emeryville to buy armoires for the new house, so I suggested Linus bring the kids over to a house I was renting in Stinson Beach. As soon as they arrived, I urged Linus to try out the kayak in the lagoon. He paddled around by himself, then with each of the girls, and climbed back onto the dock with wet pants.

  I wanted Linus to give me his thoughts on a chapter entitled, “Will Success Spoil Me?” and took the girls outside to the beach so he could read it undisturbed. Patricia and Daniela spent maybe a half hour hunting for starfish and tiptoeing into the water, after which one of them announced “Kisin kommer,” which translates to: “I’ve got to potty.”

  We returned to the house to find Linus sitting at the computer, in his underwear, a bag of pretzels at his side, intently typing away. It took him maybe fifteen seconds to realize we had arrived. He
looked up from the monitor. His first words were: “Boy, your Macintosh sucks.”

  Then: “Oh, and I put my pants in your dryer.”

  He had retitled the chapter “Fame and Fortune,” figuring that “Will Success Spoil Me?” sounded a bit egotistical. He wanted more time to write, so I took the girls out to search for seals while he finished the chapter.

  XII

  It’s easy to fight windmills if you don’t realize how hard it is.

  Five years ago when people asked me if I thought Linux would be able to take over the desktop and make a dent in Microsoft, they always had a doubtful edge to their voice. I invariably told them that I thought it would. They would look skeptical. The fact is, they probably knew more than I did about the reality.

  I didn’t really understand all the steps it would take to get there. Not only what it takes to tackle the technical problems of developing a robust and portable operating system, but what it takes to make that operating system a commercial, as well as technical, success. I would have been discouraged if I had known in advance just how much infrastructure would need to be in place to make Linux as successful as it has been. It’s not only that you have to be good. You have to be good, sure, but everything has to turn out the right way, too.

  Any sane person would have gazed up at the rugged mountain-face that needed to be scaled, and would have been absolutely daunted. Just think about the technical problems of supporting PCs, which are about the most varied hardware out there. You have to support people who have bugs that you can’t reproduce on applications that you don’t even care about. But you care about Linux, so you care about helping to fix them.