Given the nature of office politics and how corporations typically work, the technical lead person would have to be someone with a fairly strong personality. He or she should be somebody who likes working by email and who avoids taking sides. I wouldn’t use the word “liaison,” because that would imply there are two distinct sides here—the inside camp and the outside camp. And that’s not the way it should be. This technical lead person gets paid by the company to do open source. He or she knows, and everybody else knows, that this person is not paid to agree with his counterparts in the company, but simply to do the project. There’s a danger with having the leader too closely associated with the company. Folks might trust his or her technical ability, but not the nontechnical judgment.
Is there a diplomat in the house?
It’s like “Find me one honest man.”
This is why I have tried so hard over the years to avoid getting involved with Linux companies. This is becoming increasingly critical now that the money is materializing. With so many dollars floating around, people start questioning your motivations. For me, it’s helpful that I’ve been known as being neutral. You have no idea how important it is to me to maintain that neutrality. It drives me nuts.
Okay. You’re right, I should stop preaching. Open source is not for everyone or every project or every corporation. But the more that people start taking stock of the success of Linux, the more they realize this isn’t the knee-jerk rantings of idealistic, unwashed high-schoolers.
Open up anything, and the possibilities will follow. I’ve been talking about open source for as long as journalists have been asking me about it, which is basically the last five years. It used to be that you had to explain and explain what’s so great about it. And, frankly, it felt like an endless trek. It was like trudging in mud.
People get it now.
FAME AND FORTUNE
“What about the burden of fame?” That’s what some people will ask me. And let me tell you, the “burden” is not a burden at all. It’s fun being famous, and famous people who say otherwise are just trying to be nice and make nonfamous people feel like they’re better off. You’re supposed to be humble about your fame, and complain about how it destroys your life.
But face it, everybody dreams of fame and riches. I know I did. As a teenager I wished to become a famous scientist. Albert Einstein, but better. Who doesn’t? If not a scientist, then a racecar driver. Or a rock star. Or Mother Teresa. Or the President of the United States.
And actually, getting there was not at all painful. Sure, I may not be Albert Einstein but I feel comfortable about having actually made a difference, and about doing something meaningful. And getting recognized for it makes the whole thing all the better. So the next time you hear somebody complaining about fame and riches, ignore them. They’re just doing it because it’s what you’re supposed to do.
So is it all good? Of course not. There are certainly downsides to being well-known. I don’t have people recognize me in the streets (or at least not very often), but the huge amount of email I get is interspersed with the occasional message that is really hard to answer, and also hard to ignore. What do you say to somebody who asks you to give the eulogy for his dad that you never met? I never replied to that email, and I still feel a bit guilty about it. That was a very important thing for somebody, and to me it ended up being just an inconvenience.
Or how do you tell somebody who asks you to give a keynote speech at a conference that you really don’t have the time or the inclination? How do you make people realize that you long ago stopped listening to phone-mail messages, without appearing to be an inconsiderate bastard? Which you really are, after all. It’s not as if I end up caring all that deeply about every issue, just because I care deeply about the issue I’m known for: Linux.
Of course, eventually it becomes really easy to just say no. Or ignore the requests entirely; one of the reasons I love email is that it’s so convenient and easy to ignore—what’s one more email in the few hundred I get every day? The medium is so far removed from the person that it very seldom gets personal enough to make you feel guilty about ignoring it. It happens (see above), but it doesn’t happen very often. And even when you don’t ignore it, saying “no” over email is a lot easier to do than in person or over the phone.
The problem is fundamentally one of the expectations people end up having about well-known people. And the fact that it’s obviously not possible to live up to all the expectations—while feeling like you should at least try to do so. That’s partly what made writing this book a pretty nerve-wracking experience—trying to write a reasonably personal book, while at the same time not really disappointing people who expected something different.
And some of the expectations are downright silly. I often get the feeling that some people expect me to be a modern-day monk—living a frugal life in solitude. All because I thought that making Linux open and freely available on the Internet was a good idea, and because I didn’t take the traditional commercial approach to software. So then I get self-conscious and rather defensive about the fact that I actually enjoy spending money, and that I’ve finally upgraded my old Pontiac Grand Am to something more fun.[5]
Which brings up the second question after the “burden of fame” one. Namely, “Will success spoil Linus (and/or Linux)?” Will I turn into a self-centered spoiled brat who writes books about himself because he likes seeing his name in print, and because it pays off his new useless car?
The answer, of course, is yes.
After all, take a person whose lifelong philosophy has been to have fun and do something interesting, then add some money and fame, and what do you expect will happen? Instant philanthropist? I don’t think so. Giving away money to charity really never even entered my mind until David actually asked the question during the making of this book. I looked at him blankly. “Shave the whales” was the first thing that came to my mind. Obviously I was not born to have great financial responsibility.
Does success change how you think about things? It does. Linux was a different animal when there were just fifty very technical users, as opposed to 25 million (or whatever the number is today) normal people who use it at least occasionally. And Linux was very different back when the only people working on it were people who did it entirely because it was fun and interesting—with none of the commercial interests that are so obviously there today.
And the same is true of Linus the person. Things change, and claiming that this isn’t so doesn’t change the facts. Linux is not the same movement it was five years ago, and Linus isn’t the same person he was back then. And part of what has made doing Linux so very interesting to me has been exactly the fact that it hasn’t been the same, and that new issues have continuously kept coming up. And they haven’t been just technological issues, but issues involving how the whole meaning of Linux changes in the face of success. Life would be boring otherwise.
So instead of using the word “spoiled,” I’d prefer to just say that commercial success has made both Linux and me “different.” I’d hesitate to say “grown up”—I think, for me, having three kids made far more of a difference that way—but simply different. Better, in many ways, but also less pure. Linux used to be just for technical people, and a safe haven for geeks. A bastion of purity, where technology mattered and little else.
These days that is not true anymore. Linux still has the strong technical background, but having millions of users makes everybody very aware of the fact that you have to be a lot more careful about what you do. Backward compatibility is suddenly a factor—and some day, twenty years from now, somebody will come along, say that enough is enough, and start his own operating system called “Fredix.”[6] Without all the historical baggage. And that’s exactly as it should be.
But what makes me inordinately proud is that even when “Fredix” comes along, things won’t be the same anymore. If nothing else, what Linux has done is to make people aware of a new way of doing things, of how open
source actually enables people to build on the work done by others. Open source has been around for a long time, but what Linux did was to move it into the general consciousness. So when Fredix comes along, it won’t have to start from scratch.
And thus, the world has become a slightly better place.
Nearly a year after we started working on this book, Linus and I paid a Friday night visit to the car racing/batting cage place where we had competed with each other months earlier. This time, Linus clobbered me at both activities: He drove faster and made better hits. Later, over Turkish food, I blamed my lousy performance on a particularly frustrating day at work.
He looked up and said: “Well, you’ve got to hang in there for three more months.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t that when you vest your first chunk of stock options?”
The reason I bring this up is because the night of our previous competition at the car racing/batting cageplace, Linus confessed that because of his poor memory, he regularly had to ask Tove to remind him of his phone numbers. Suddenly he now remembers somebody else’s vesting schedule, and he can rattle off where we were when I first mentioned it to him. A year ago he seemed to delight in the role of an absent-minded professor, fuzzy about the details of anything less significant than SuperString Theory or the memory capacity of his earliest computers. Now he is incredibly tuned in.
Back in January we sat in my old hot tub and I joked about the Marin Historical Commission bugging me to donate it to their museum.
In August he casually says, “Hey, when are you going to donate that hot tub?” He doesn’t have to consult an electronic device to remember the dates when Avuton will be visiting. He is plugged into the personal details of friends and co-workers in a way he didn’t seem to be a year earlier. In fact, he even knows what’s going on with my friends and co-workers. And for a fellow whose first words to me on the subject were, “Actually, I don’t remember much of my childhood,” he suddenly seems to have conjured up the memories: “Did I tell you how embarrassed I was when my mother wanted me to ask my grandfather to give me the extra 100 FM I needed to buy my first watch?”
The clarity thing was just one way Linus seemed to have changed over the course of an important year in his life. There were little things. In November, we took the family road trip to Los Angeles that provided the backdrop for the “Meaning of Life” preface, partly because the Torvaldses were invited to stay at the Brentwood home of the Finnish Consulate General. Before the trip, Linus was glazed-eyed as he scanned the wine counter of a Santa Clara Safeway. “Help me pick out wine as a gift,” he said. “I know nothing about wine.” Ten months later he knows which of two similar cabernets we should choose from the Bodega Bay Lodge minibar, to drink while watching an in-room action movie. I catch him swirling his wine before drinking.
And then there’s the exercise thing. On my first visit to Linus’s home, he seemed to have a typical geek-like cavalier approach to his body and physical well-being, the “my-body’s-just-there-to-carry-around-my-brilliant-mind” philosophy. Linus even seemed to take pride in the fact that he never exercised. Tove obviously felt differently. Her karate trophies lined a full bookcase, and her aerobics videos rested on the television set. And it seemed to be a point of contention. “Maybe in five years some doctor will tell me I’ll have to lose weight or something,” Linus said at the time.
I like to exercise and figured it should be a main component of our outings. I wanted to introduce him to surfing, but it made sense to start out with boogie-boarding. We drove over to Half Moon Bay one afternoon in early May, rented wet suits and boards, and Linus protested heavily at the thought of wading into the chilly waters of the Pacific, even in a wet suit. But within minutes something amazing happened: He delighted in riding the waves. “This is great,” he enthused like a five-year old at one point, slapping me a high five. Of course, about fifteen minutes later he developed a nasty leg cramp—from being so out of shape, he reasoned—and had to stop. (When the cramp hit, he just sat there in the white water, apparently unable to get up, as waves washed over him. My first thought was: “Oh fuck. If I kill this guy, I’ll have millions of nerds on my case.”)
He looked forward to everything we did during the reporting phase of this book: playing tennis, racing each other at swimming, doing the scary amusements at Great America, driving golf balls. It got to the point at which he became less interested in sitting around talking into my tape recorder than he was in whatever activity I had arranged. The mud baths, hiking up Mt. Tamalpais, shooting pool, whatever. “I could do this on a regular basis,” he said, sweating heavily after playing tennis with me near my home. That time he borrowed both a racquet and running shoes. Afterward, he kept his new pair of running shoes in the trunk of his car, just in case.
THE MEANING OF LIFE II
Have you ever lain back on a warm summer’s night, looking up at the stars, and really wondered why you are here? What is your place in things, and what are you supposed to do with your life?
Yeah, well, neither have I.
Yet I ended up having a theory about Life, The Universe, and Everything—or at least the subset called “Life.” You were introduced to this theory in the preface of this book. And since you’ve gotten this far, I might as well explain myself a little more.
My theory didn’t come about while staring up at the stars, immersed in wonder over the immenseness of it all on a clear night. It came about while I was preparing for a speech. When you become well known for one thing, people just assume you can be trusted to generate brilliant insight into unrelated bodies of knowledge that have been mystifying humankind for millions of years. And they want you to share those insights before a herd of perfect strangers.
No, it doesn’t make much sense. I got into Linux because I was a technology geek, not because I was any good at public appearances, let alone philosophizing without prudent limits. But few things in life make all that much sense, so I’m not complaining.
Back to the subject at hand.
This time I was invited to a local event in Berkeley called “Webrush.” Normally I wouldn’t even consider it, but the invitation came through the Finnish Consulate here in the United States and being a patriotic person (or at least feeling slightly guilty about hating snow and having moved abroad), I had stupidly said “Okay. Jag gör det.[7]”
Now, nobody expected me to talk about the meaning of life, least of all myself. But this event was about life in the networked society, and I was there as the Internet person and representative of Finland. Finland, due to Nokia (the largest, best, and most beautiful company in the world as any Finn will tell you), is into communications in a big way, and “the networked society” is where it is at. We’ve already discussed how there are more cell phones than people in Finland, and the current research into finding ways of implanting the things surgically at birth.
So there I sit, wondering what I should talk about regarding communications. Oh, I forgot to mention that most of the rest of the panel would be comprised of philosophers talking about technology. This is Berkeley, after all. The two things they take very seriously in Berkeley are Berkeley politics and Berkeley philosophers.
So what the heck. If they were going to have philosophers talking about technology, why not have a technologist like me talking about philosophy? Nobody should accuse me of not having balls. They might call me terminally stupid (and hey, they probably do)—but chicken?
Not this geek.
So there I am, feverishly trying to come up with a subject to speak about the next day. (I never get around to doing speeches until it is way too late, so late the evening before the event is usually when you’ll find me worrying about it.) And I’m struggling there, trying to ponder the “communication society” and what it’s all about, and what Nokia and all the other communications companies will eventually evolve into.
And the best I can do is to just explain the meaning of life.
It’s actually not much of a “m
eaning.” It’s more a law of life, hereafter to be called “Linus’s Law.” It’s equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics in physics, but rather than explaining the devolution of order in the universe, it is about the evolution of life.
I’m not talking “evolution” in the Darwinian sense here. That’s a different thing—for Webrush I was more interested in how society evolves, and how we moved from the industrial society into a communications society: What’s next, and why? I wanted to make it sound good, and to make enough sense to convince an audience for the duration of a panel discussion. Everybody has his or her own agenda, and that day mine was to emerge alive from a panel discussion with two notable philosophers.
So why do societies evolve? What’s the driving factor? Is it really technology that drives society?—which seems to be a common view. Was it really the invention of the steam engine that got Europe started as the industrial society, and eventually evolved us through Nokia and cell phones into the communications society? That seemed to be the philosophers’ take on this all, and they seemed to be interested in how technology changes society.
And I, as a technologist, know that technology drives nothing. It is society that changes technology, not the other way around. Technology just sets the boundaries for what we can do, and how cheaply we can do it.
Technology, like the devices it creates, is at least so far inherently stupid. It’s only interesting insofar as what you can do with it, and the driving force behind it is thus really human needs and interests. We don’t communicate more these days because we have the means to do so—we communicate more these days because people are blabbermouths, and they want to communicate; and if the means aren’t there, they will be created. Thus Nokia.
So, my argument went, in order to understand the evolution of society, you have to understand what really motivates people. Is it money? Is it success? Is it sex? What fundamentally makes people do what they do?
Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Page 23
