Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  Clearly, as the unfortunate passing of the DMCA showed, economic incentives are doing well. The question is, what kind of intellectual property law would help drive development while being less driven by crass money-grabbing interests?

  The issue is intensified by the fact that modern technology (and the Internet in particular) are weakening many of the traditional forms of intellectual property protection almost faster than we can keep up. And in ways nobody could have predicted. Who would have imagined that Midwestern grandmothers would be pirating needlepoint instructions over the Internet? The ability to copy works of art—and technology itself—on a large scale has become so widespread and easily available that institutions with vested IP are running around doing the best they can to shore up their interests. They are doing all they can to make such copying illegal, and introducing new measures to actually outlaw technology that can be used for piracy.

  What’s wrong with this picture? The problem is that a lot of the new efforts to make it harder to illegally use other people’s intellectual property also make it much harder to use other people’s work in legal ways. The classic example of this from the Linux world is the so-called DeCSS lawsuit.

  In the DeCSS suit, people who were working on technology to decode DVD movies were sued by the entertainment industry for making the code available to others on the Internet. It didn’t matter to the judge on the case that the ultimate aim of the project was perfectly legal; the fact that the project could potentially be used for illegal purposes made it illegal in the United States to distribute even the information on where to find the instructions to do the decoding. (The “DeCSS” name itself comes from the project undoing the DVD Content Scrambling System—CSS. So you “de-CSS” something in order to remove the scrambling so that you can watch the movie on your computer.)

  This is a perfect example of intellectual property law being used not to help foster innovation, but to control the marketplace, to control what consumers can and cannot do. It’s an example of intellectual property law gone bad.

  Such misuses of intellectual property power aren’t limited to technology, by the way. Another classic example is the use of trade secret law to prosecute and persecute the people who tried to inform the public about Scientology. The Church of Scientology successfully claimed that their scriptures (“Advanced Technology”) fell under trade secret protection, and used IP law to defend them from being made public.

  What are the alternatives? Imagine an intellectual property law that actually took other people’s rights into account, too. Imagine IP laws that encouraged openness and sharing. Laws that say sure, you can still have your secrets, whether they be technological or religious, but that doesn’t mandate legal protection for such secrecy.

  Yeah, I know. How unrealistic of me.

  An End to Control

  The way to survive and flourish is to make the best damn product. you can. And if you can’t survive and flourish on that, then you shouldn’t. If you can’t make a good car, then you deserve to go down like the rock that was the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s. Success is about quality and about giving folks what they want.

  It’s not about trying to control people.

  The trouble is, people and companies are too often motivated by pure greed. And that always causes them to lose in the long run. Greed leads to decisions governed by paranoia and a need for total control. Those are bad, shortsighted decisions that end up in disaster, or near disaster. The simple example on everyone’s mind has been the phenomenal early success of wireless technology in Europe at the expense of American companies. While the U.S. companies individually tried to control the market by using their own proprietary standards, the European companies rallied around a single standard, GSM, and chose to compete based on which company could produce the best product and provide the best service. The U.S. companies have fallen behind, plagued by their own competing standards. With a market buoyed by a common standard, the European companies have all shared in the boom. That’s why kids in Prague were swapping cell-phone text messages years before kids in Peoria had even heard about it as a new way of cheating on tests.

  If you try to make money by controlling a resource, you’ll eventually find yourself out of business. This is a form of despotism, and history overflows with examples of its ill effects. Say it’s the 1800s in the U.S. West and you control the source of water for local farmers. You’re stingy with the water and overcharge. At some point, it inevitably becomes profitable for someone else to devise a way to bring it in from somewhere else, and then your market collapses. Or technology advances so that pipes can transport water, from a distance. Either way, as circumstances change your hold gets broken and you’re left with nothing. This happens all the time, and it’s amazing that people still can’t see it coming.

  Flash forward to the music industry in the waning years of the twentieth century. The resource it controls is entertainment. A company owns the rights to an artist’s work. That artist produces a number of successful singles, but the company puts maybe one or two of those singles on each CD it produces. That way it can sell multiple CDs, instead of the one that everyone wants. Then somebody invents the technology for MP3. Suddenly, music can be downloaded from the Internet. MP3 is about doing the right thing for consumers by giving them a choice.

  So if a typical CD costs $10 and contains two singles a consumer wants, it may make more sense for him to purchase those singles separately—along with others he wants—off MP3 for $1.50 apiece. No longer is the buyer trapped in a despotic situation, living by the greed-inspired rules of the music company, which wants to give up just the bite-sized pieces that it chooses to give up. There’s a good reason why the music industry is scared to death of MP3 and its sister technologies, Napster and Gnutella. The price of water got so high that it became profitable for somebody to devise a new method of bringing it in from somewhere else.

  But this is an industry with a history of trying to control consumers—if not by what music it chooses to release, then by copyright and technology. This is the industry that tripped all over itself in the 1960s, trying to keep consumers from copying music onto tapes when that technology entered the market. Because the industry felt tapes were the perfect medium for people to disobey copyright laws, it argued for ways to protect its copyrights. This was a bad excuse. The industry was taking the moral high ground and pleading copyright when it was simply trying to maintain control of its niche franchise. The fact is, tapes never hurt the music industry. Sure, people copied music for their own use, but that only meant that people actually bought more LPs from which to copy. Duh. A few decades later, when CDs came out, the players were built so that you couldn’t copy your tape perfectly. Paranoia strikes again. Next came digital tapes. They involved a different sampling rate from CDs—48 kilohertz versus 44.1—to prevent users from copying their CDs onto digital tape. Again the industry tried to screw over the customer to get control. But in the case of digital tapes, the market never quite hit. It was a bit like fooling with Mother Nature.

  By trying to control each successive technology, the music industry only helps inspire people to devise new ways around it. Are they ever going to get it?

  That brings us, inevitably, to DVDs. This time the entertainment industry delivered much better sound and video than VHS tapes, plus a smaller format and greater ease-of-use. But they added encryption to prevent copying. And to add insult to injury, they added geographic area codes. The DVD you bought at the San Francisco airport wouldn’t play in Europe. It made a perverse sense to the industry: Hey you guys, we can sell movies at a higher price in Europe! So let’s make sure that Europeans can’t buy movies from the United States.

  Could the entertainment industry not have predicted the obvious? That the price of water would get so high that somebody would devise a new method of piping it in from somewhere else?

  Yes, while the industry was greedily trying to control people through technology, the DVD encryption was cracked—not even
by people who wanted to copy DVDs but by people who simply wanted to view them under Linux. These are folks who actually wanted to buy DVDs, but they couldn’t; the discs would have been useless on their equipment. The industry’s moves to protect its fief-dom backfired: It simply prevented the market from expanding, and created the incentive for the cracking of the DVD encryption.

  Once again, the short-term strategy turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

  The entertainment industry is just one example. The same thing has been happening for years in software. That’s why Microsoft’s strategy of bundling software is ultimately doomed to fail. Open source products, on the other hand, cannot possibly be used in a despotic manner because they’re free. If somebody tried to bundle things with Linux, somebody else could just unbundle it and sell it the way people really want it.

  It’s doubly futile to attempt to control people through technology. In the end, it always not only hurts the company but also hinders the acceptance of the technology. A recent example is Java, which has lost a lot of the appeal it originally had. By trying to control the Java environment, Sun Microsystems basically lost it. Java is still doing reasonably well, but it surely hasn’t lived up to its potential.

  Sun wasn’t trying to make money on Java itself, but the company saw the programming language as a way to make its computer more unique to users and get us out of Microsoft’s grip—and sell more Sun hardware, by the way. But while they weren’t really trying to make money on Java, they did feel that they had to keep control of it as a phenomenon and as a microbe. All of their licensing terms came with a lot of extra baggage just for this control.

  Good product. But the problem was that they were trying too hard to screw over Microsoft. They were motivated by fear, loathing, and hate, which is sort of a mid-to-late 1990s approach to business. (Think of the Grateful Dead lyric: “Ain’t no time to hate.”) And because they were so hateful of Microsoft and so afraid, they made all the wrong licensing decisions. They made it difficult for everybody, even their partners, to use the product. That’s why companies like Hewlett Packard and IBM all eventually decided to make their own Java implementations. They just said “Screw Sun.”

  Sun tried to get Java standardized through two different standardization bodies, and each time they basically pulled out because of the control issues. On the one hand, Sun wanted to standardize the language. But at the same time they didn’t want to lose control. So the standardization boards basically said, “Hey, this is not just about you.” And as a result, Sun just flaked out. It’s an example of a company trying to control technology in ways that make no sense for the people who actually use the technology. And it’s always going to fail for the company. It also makes the technology itself fail—or take longer to be accepted.

  Contrast that with the If-you-love-something-set-it-free strategy taken by Palm Computing. The folks at Palm made their development environment open, and also opened up their platform, not only to vendors but to individuals who would want to write programs for the platform. They opened up their APIs and made it easy to get their development tools for free. What this did was create a cottage industry around the Palm Pilot. It made the Palm phenomenon more than just one company struggling in a new market. So now you have companies selling games that work on Palm Pilots, and more advanced calendar programs than what Palm itself offers. Now the consumer can choose what he or she wants and everybody benefits, particularly Palm, which enjoys a larger market as a result of opening itself up.

  Handspring is doing the same thing with its device, the Visor. It’s a Palm competitor that uses the Palm operating system, and the company takes openness a step further by allowing hardware plug-ins like GPS receivers and mobile phone attachments. Like Palm, Handspring is creating a community of companies to support a new platform.

  What Sun could have done is allow anybody to do their own Java—no strings attached—while wagering that they themselves could do a better job. That’s the sign of a company that isn’t blinded by greed or by fear of competition. It’s the sign of a company that believes in itself. And doesn’t have time to hate.

  THE AMUSEMENT RIDE AHEAD

  Is there anything more obnoxious than business prognosticators? Those self-important types who pretend to know where the insane technology amusement ride will take us? I guess they serve a good function. They populate the panel discussions and keynote speeches of the indistinguishable technology conferences that seem to crop up like unpleasant, inedible mushrooms in your flower bed. People hoping to cash in on technology trends spend thousands of dollars to hear them speak at technology conferences. It keeps an army of hotel workers and food handlers and bartenders honestly employed, so I suppose they serve a purpose.

  And now David tells me that I should do one of those “Future of Business” chapters, too. I feel a bit sullied by the thought, but hey, he didn’t let me drown while we were boogey-boarding, and if he believes that readers will think the future of business is more interesting than the meaning of life, then I’ll just shut up and write.

  However.

  I’ll go on record saying that I’ve not been a very good predictor of much of anything in my life, as far as I can remember. Did I predict that the little operating system I started writing for my own use would someday be all over the place? Nope. Took me by surprise, it did. My only defense is that nobody else seems to do be doing any better on this crystal ball thing either, and if I was taken by surprise by how big Linux became in the industry, then everybody else was absolutely flabbergasted. So I probably did better than most. And who knows? Maybe through this chapter I will be known as the Nostradamus of our time.

  And maybe not. Here goes, anyway.

  We can, of course, look to past experience. We can trace in sad detail how, say, an invincible-seeming company like AT&T went limp—and we can predict that if we stick around long enough, the weeds will overrun those tidy little green buildings in Redmond someday, too. Just as today’s hot young starlet will develop wrinkles and sagging breasts, today’s business hero will be supplanted by a new, more inspired model; and the hero’s company, even if it breaks a sweat reinventing itself—or whatever they’re calling it this month—will end up sagging and groaning, AT&T-style.

  Call it evolution. It’s certainly not rocket science. No business will live forever, and that is just as well.

  But what is it that actually drives this evolution? Is there some fundamental, inherent evolution of technology that will one day cause computers to take over, leaving the human race behind in the dust, like some people seem to think? Or is it just some random inevitability of progress, a “straight ahead and damn the torpedoes” kind of thing that causes technological advances?

  I say no.

  Technology is what we make of it, and neither business nor technology will change the basic nature of human needs and yearnings. As with everything else, the evolution slowly but inexorably will cause technology to move away from plain survival through a society based on communication and finally into the realm of entertainment (déjà vu alert: Yes, you’ve seen this theory before in these pages, and, assuming you stick around to the bitter end, you’ll see it once more).

  Humans are destined to be party animals, and technology will follow.

  So forget all the predictions about what technology can do in ten years. That’s not very relevant at all. We were able to put a man on the moon thirty years ago, and we’ve not been back since. I’m personally convinced that is simply because the moon turned out to be a drab place with basically no nightlife at all—sort of like San Jose. As a result, people didn’t want to go back, and the amount of technology we’ve amassed in the meantime doesn’t mean a thing. The moon stays empty.

  What really matters when you talk about the future of technology is what people want. Once you’ve figured that out, the only remaining question is how quickly you can mass-produce the thing and make it cheap enough that people can get it without sacrificing anything else they want. Noth
ing else really matters.

  A small digression is in order here. What really sells, of course, is perception, not reality. Cruise liners sell the perception of freedom, of the salty seas, of good food and romance of Love Boat proportions. Who cares if the cabin is cramped if you feel like you’re free as a bird!

  And what does this all means? It explains, for example, why people are going so ga-ga over the Sony PlayStation 2, the single biggest piece of technology to hit the store shelves this year. (I’m writing this just days after it was introduced in the United States in late October 2000). Talk about the embodiment of the entertainment society!

  It also points out how personal computers have a perception problem. Clearly the PC industry is nervous about game consoles, mainly because they are seen as nonthreatening, fun and cheap, while PC’s are mostly seen as complicated and expensive. Sometimes even inimical.

  It also makes me personally convinced that if we’re still talking in a big way about operating systems fifteen years from now, something is seriously wrong somewhere. This may sound strange coming from somebody whose main claim to fame is writing his own operating system, but the fact is that, statistically speaking, nobody wants an operating system.

  In fact, nobody even wants a computer. What everybody wants is this magical toy that can be used to browse the Web, write term papers, play games, balance the checkbook, and so on.

  The fact that you need a computer and an operating system to do all this is something that most people would rather not ever think about.

  This is why a lot of analysts like the notion of devices like the Sony PlayStation 2 that take over a number of the chores of a computer, without having that scary hand-sweat-producing property of being obviously complicated, scary machines. Which is technologically senseless, as we’re getting more and more computers into the house all the time like this, while being unaware of how complicated and scary they could be.