Softpanorama Linus Torvalds' Interviews Collection (1999)
(preserving Linus Torvalds interviews for humanity ;-)

LM: Where do get your information about Microsoft?

Torvalds: Mailing lists. A lot of people send me rumors just because they know who I am. I don't actually have people at Microsoft telling me what's up.

LM: Do you know any Microsoft people?

Torvalds: I know some people who got hired by Microsoft.

LM: Has Microsoft ever asked you to work for them?

Torvalds: No.

LM: Would you ever?

Torvalds: I don't see why not, if they had an interesting enough job. I probably wouldn't, because I don't think they have an interesting enough job for me to do. But they have the money to make it very tempting.

LM: So what would it take to get you there?

Torvalds: Essentially free hands and lots of money.

LM: So you don't consider it out of the question?

Torvalds: The free hands part of the agreement would have to mean that I could continue doing Linux, and that it's my work, so they can't own it. I went to Transmeta not for the big money but because of the interesting work. My contract says that I can work on Linux and it's not Transmeta property even when I do it on company time.

LM: I don't understand how Linux and Transmeta overlap.

Torvalds: They aren't supposed to! I can't say anything about what Transmeta does. When it comes to Linux, however, I can say whatever I like. That's one of the good things about doing Linux. When journalists interview me, I never need to lie.

LM: We have been talking a lot about Microsoft. Do you think about them as much as some other people seem to?

Torvalds: No. Normally, Microsoft never comes up on the development side, because they are very rarely doing anything interesting that we want to try on a kernel level.

LM: Does their success bother you?

Torvalds: No, what bothers me is not their success. But there are some secondary things that result from that success that have been bothersome. A year ago, for example, there were people inside companies that wanted to deploy Linux for internal use -- it happens all the time. They told me that they tried but had been overruled by management who said, "We are an NT-only shop." That's not Microsoft's fault, unless they pressure people into doing that, which they may or may not do. But it's a secondary effect of their dominance in the market.

LM: If another company had won the software wars the way Microsoft has -- say Sun or Apple -- do you think the world would be different?

Torvalds: Maybe Linux wouldn't have come to be -- because I wouldn't have needed to build it if there had been a default operating system that was technically more sane. I don't particularly admire the Sun OS, but at least it makes sense to a large degree. I actually disliked Solaris when they introduced it. But that's because I came from a university background, and SunOS is what I used. What I started out trying to do was to make Linux essentially the same environment at home as I already had at the university. That was one of the driving reasons why I did Linux, because finally at the university I had found an operating system that made sense, that you didn't have to fight to make it do what you wanted it to do. I wanted to have that at home, and I couldn't, because I couldn't afford it.

LM: Sun always claims the moral high ground vis-a-vis Microsoft. Do you view it that way?

Torvalds: I think Sun has a lot of interesting ideas. I like them technically a lot more. As a company, though, I don't see any big difference. However, you should hold the giants to different standards than the little people, and right now Sun is one of the little people. They aren't the nicest little people, but if you're small, it's OK to be mean. [Laughs.]

LM: People always talk about Linux and Microsoft. But isn't Linux equally threatening to Sun? If you run Linux on a standard Intel PC, you aren't going to buy a lot of Sun workstations, are you?

Torvalds: Well, a year ago, people were saying that UNIX was going away completely. But today that's not how people see it. People are seeing NT failing and renewed interest in UNIX, partially because of Linux. So I actually think that Linux is very much in the same market as Solaris, but at the same time Linux actually helps revitalize some of the UNIX market. So far at least Linux has been in the low end of the UNIX market, where niche vendors haven't done that much. They tend to have much higher profit margins in the larger installations where Linux hasn't yet penetrated. So in that sense, Linux is much more competitive with NT, because it's used in the same kinds of places.

LM: To the extent that Linux is at the low end -- is that permanent?

Torvalds: I don't think so. But at the same time I think the low end is fairly interesting. The low end for me is actually dual- and quad-CPU machines. It's not really low end. How-ever, it's not the high-end servers.

LM: But can Linux also play in the high end, like with mission critical applications?

Torvalds: Two years ago, you wouldn't have even asked that. Today, you are asking that question! It is definitely moving towards that. NT was that way too. Two years ago you wouldn't have considered NT for a real server -- today you might. For a lot of mid-class servers, NT is perfectly fine. But I think Linux has already overtaken NT when it comes to scalability to larger machines.

LM: Three years from now, what degree of multiprocessor support will there be in Linux?

Torvalds: I'd say that three years from now you will regularly see up to 16 CPUs in one machine. After that it gets too expensive to do the memory subsystem for symmetric multiprocessing. So what you do then is you cluster them: you have 16 of these machines, and a fast network between them.

LM: How do you feel when you think about the fact that your creation is changing the software world?

Torvalds: It's happened over eight years -- that's more than a quarter of my life! It's happened so gradually, so it seems so normal. Right now Linux has something like 17 percent of the server market ... that's peanuts. But 17 percent of the workstation market and the desktop market -- that's my ultimate campaign.

LM: Are you rich?

Torvalds: I have two kids and a wife, so ... the money rolls out at the same rate it rolls in. I do own options in Transmeta.

LM: So if they went public, you would do really well, right?

Torvalds: Yes. I'm not worried about making money, because in this area, even if Transmeta doesn't have an IPO -- and I certainly hope they will -- I still get a salary and I can still live on a salary.

LM: Other people are trying to now profit from Linux. Aren't you?

Torvalds: No. But there is one Linux company that gave me an employee stock option package even though I am not an employee. I'm not going to tell you which one.

LM: What motivates you personally? Is it something philosophical? Religious? Technical? Why the effort?

Torvalds: It started out as just personal interest. It wasn't that I wanted to change the world; I wanted to make Linux freely available, but there wasn't any deep philosophical thinking behind it. I want to have fun in my life. Not fun like parties ... I want do something that matters. The fact that it matters to a lot of people gives it meaning to me. I want to be the best I can be, and I don't plan to join the Army! [Laughs.]

LM: Do you want to change the world?

Torvalds: One hundred years from now if people asked you who were the most important people in the 20th Century, the only person who I am sure would be on the list is Einstein.

LM: What about Bill Gates?

Torvalds: He might be there in 100 years. But he won't be there in 2000 years. Einstein will. Mozart will. Jesus will be. Maybe I won't get to that level. [Laughs.] In 100 years if I am remembered as a Chopin or an Einstein I will be a hell of a lot happier than if I am remembered as a random "capitalist pig"!

LM: What is it that you enjoy about developing software?

Torvalds: There isn't a final goal -- the goal changes constantly. A good example is doing multiprocessor support. Four years ago I thought it was too expensive and normal people wouldn't have access to it; that there's no point. I wasn't very interested in it. So the first SMP versions of Linux came out without any help from me at all. Then I started to be very interested indeed because the systems are very cheap these days and it's technically a very challenging area ... I decided it was what I wanted to do. So that's what I've been working on. It's not just me, however. The fact that SMP was done without me is an example of somebody else who had a different priority.

LM: But as you go about adding features, how do you avoid doing to Linux what happened to NT?

Torvalds: In the end it will happen to anything. It's just a basic fact of software engineering that it's a lot easier to add features than it is to remove them! Adding features never breaks old programs, unless you have a bug -- and even then the bug may be so subtle that you never notice. Eventually it will happen to Linux too. The only thing you can do is to make that process as slow as you can make it.

LM: How can you make it slower in the Linux model than in the NT model?

Torvalds: There are a few ways of doing that. You have to have a basic philosophy. You have to have some fairly basic rules about how things should work so that whenever someone adds new features you can ask, "Does this make sense in the larger picture?" If you don't have a larger picture, you can never ask yourself whether some new feature makes sense. UNIX has a philosophy that makes it less susceptible to these random additions. But the Windows philosophy is to add whatever it takes -- to do whatever you have to do for marketing reasons. It's not written down anywhere, but trust me, that's what the Windows philosophy is. UNIX, however, was not quite a research operating system. A lot of research operating systems go to the other extreme, which is, "We don't care about how the world looks, because we want it to look this way, and that's the way it's going to look." You can't do that either -- that's putting blindfolds on yourself! The other thing that Linux has that NT doesn't have any more is a few fairly strong personalities. You have me, you have Alan Cox, and there are others too. You have people who actually know how it works. Say you have a bug, such as a null pointer, where the system crashes because you expect the pointer to point to a real data structure and it doesn't. The easy way to avoid the crash is to place a safety mechanism in the code which says, "If this pointer isn't null, then do this." This way, you don't get the crash because you don't use the pointer when it's trapped. The point is that if you actually understand the code, you can say,"That pointer should never have been null in the first place," and you can backtrack to find out where the real bug is. Instead of hiding the crash, you go back and find out why it happened. If you hide the bugs, you'll never find them.

LM: To what extent is Linux bug-free?

Torvalds: Nothing is bug-free! Of all the operating systems out there, the ones that are the less buggy are already a subset of what any modern operating system does. One way of not being buggy is to not do too many things.

LM: What do you think of people who use Windows?

Torvalds: The operating system itself might be bad, but that doesn't make the users who use it bad. Users who use it have very good reasons to do so. But it goes the other way too -- if people who use Windows are good users, that doesn't make Windows good.

LM: What kind of computers does your family use?

Torvalds: My mother uses a Mac. My Dad uses Windows ... so does my sister. My wife uses Linux.

LM: Your sister -- do you think she ought to use Linux?

Torvalds: There's no reason for her to. She doesn't actually use Windows -- she uses Microsoft Works. Windows is really only a program loader. I can see why Windows 95 has 95% market share. I'm going to change it, but it's going to take some time. Give me a few more years and ask me again.

LM: How do you feel about being compared to Bill Gates?

Torvalds: It doesn't make sense. Bill Gates is a businessman. He's not a programmer. It's like comparing apples and oranges. But it does make perfect sense from a journalistic point of view -- that's something I understand because everyone in my family is a journalist. My Dad is stationed in Moscow as the Moscow reporter for Finnish radio. My mother works for the Finnish news service, my sister works in translations, my grandfather on my father's side was a newspaper journalist, my uncle is on Finnish TV. So I know how journalists work. They drink too much and they search for interesting stories. [Smiles broadly.]

LM: What about Bill Gates?

Torvalds: For all I know, maybe he's actually a nice guy. He's supposed to have a sense of humor, even if it's kind of nasty. I come from a family with a kind of cutting-edge humor.

LM: Is there a sense in the Linux community that the companies now trying to leverage Linux are just parasites?

Torvalds: I don't think that's true. To a large degree, people are happy about companies jumping in. One of the problems has been a lack of documentation. Now with companies like SGI and Hewlett-Packard jumping on to the Linux ship, when I need information about things I don't know how to use, I can go and ask them.

LM: So there's no one whose involvement in Linux makes you a little nervous?

Torvalds: A long time ago, in 1992 or 1993, when the first commercial companies came along, I was a little nervous, yes. These were people copying disks and selling them for $10 at computer user groups. I was kind of nervous about what would happen with all this "commercial" activity! But since then, everything that has happened has been so positive. Red Hat is the obvious example -- in the US, they are the largest Linux company that makes money. They have never been interested in modifying the kernel ... that wasn't what they were in it for. They're hiring Linux kernel people not because they want to modify Linux, but because they want to make sure there are people who are paid to fix bugs. What the commercial companies have done is something I never wanted to do, which is to make it packaged; to make it a nice thing that you can install off of a CD.

LM: So Compaq, Dell, IBM -- The more the merrier, as far as you are concerned?

Torvalds: Yes. I've protected myself through the copyright. Making sure that when they make changes, if they are good changes, I can use them. If they are bad changes I don't care because I don't need to use them!

LM: The whole kernel is a great bundle of copyrights, isn't it?

Torvalds: I think that's a great advantage. There are a lot of people who own copyrights on their own drivers or file systems. I happen to be the main copyright owner and I am a copyright holder on a lot of other people's code too. It's a double-bind situation. Say I wanted to be the next Bill Gates, and I thought the way to become the next Bill Gates would be to say, "Linux 2.2 may be out, but I am working on Linux 3.0, and by the way it will cost you $150." I can't do that, because I'm not the only copyright holder. And no one else can do it either. The only way to do it would be to get everyone with their hands in the kernel to agree, and that's not going to happen. This actually makes some commercial companies happier about Linux because they know that I can't be a competitor to them.

LM: How did you decide what would go into 2.2, and how will you decide what will go into 3.0 or even 2.3?

Torvalds: It's mostly timing. You want to make new releases often enough that people don't start worrying about it. Quite frankly it was too long between 2.0 and 2.2 -- two and a half years, and there were a lot of people who had to upgrade to one of the development kernels in the interim because they did SMP better, or something else. But it's not supposed to be that you have to upgrade to a development kernel because you want a feature. The situation should be that users want to be on the latest stable release, and that every year or year and a half you get a new stable release that has new features and then you move on. It's really hard to make a release. I've been wanting to make a new release for almost a year now because it was time for it. But there was always something in flux. This is why everybody has problems making new releases. This is why Windows 98 was Windows 98 and not Windows 96!

LM: So what's the difference between Linux and Windows?

Torvalds: One of the differences is that we don't make promises we don't keep. My only promise was that I told people I was trying to get 2.2 out before Christmas -- I was only about a month late.

LM: What's the process of defining what's going to be in the next release? Do you go around and talk to users?

Torvalds: You have to realize that it's not just a question of the "next release." You don't jump from 2.0 two and a half years ago to 2.2 today. What happens is that you have two and a half years of development, in the 2.1 kernel in this case, and 2.2 is just the sum of that development.

LM: So whatever 2.2 is, how did you decide what it would be?

Torvalds: It's whatever came up during development. Some of it is from developers who upgraded their machines and wanted to do something faster. Or others who started Web surfing and noticed that it's slower than it should be ... we should be able to push all the data out at wire speeds. More common is that you have users who say "this isn't as fast as I want it to be" or want some particular new feature. It's usually not large customers -- it's usually just someone out there in the middle of Siberia who has a need for something! They might send a note saying, "I wanted to do this and here is how I did it. Could you please include it in the next release." That's fairly normal. Sometimes I say, "No, because it's obvious that you are just a crackpot in the middle of Siberia and nobody else wants to do it." [Laughs.] And sometimes I say, "No, because I can understand why you would want to do this but you obviously did it the wrong way." And sometimes I say, "Yes. This makes sense. Maybe it's not bug-free but we can fix the bugs."

LM: How big is the kernel now compared to five years ago?

Torvalds: When I released the first version it was about 10,000 lines of code, now it's about 15 million. The largest portion of that is by far the device drivers.

LM: Do you write code?

Torvalds: I do some of that, but honestly 90 percent of my time these days goes into managing.

LM: You said you would work for Microsoft at the right price. How do you think that would impact Linux?

Torvalds: It's extremely unlikely I would go to work for Microsoft in the next few years. One of the reasons I went to Transmeta is that I didn't want to go to work for a Linux company. I had Linux companies say, "Whatever Transmeta offers you, we'll top that by 10 percent." I wouldn't need to do anything specific, I just had to work there. This was two years ago when the business side of Linux wasn't that big. The reason I didn't do that is because if I had gone to work for some-one like Red Hat or Caldera, that would have given them an icon. I would prefer for them to do their own marketing on their own technical merit instead of saying, "This is the real Linux because we have Linus."

LM: Does anyone in your life, like your wife or your parents, ever say, "Hey, forget about changing the world. Why don't you get rich now?"

Torvalds: I do have the pressure from my wife, who says, "Please, could you take a vacation now?"

LM: What would happen to Linux were you to suddenly take a vacation?

Torvalds: I don't think anything really bad would happen. Right now, it might -- but in a year, it's not going to matter any more. It's already grown larger than one man. Right now people aren't quite aware of that yet. Once you have a few large companies that say, "We will ship Linux and it will be one of our main ways of selling stuff," it's grown far beyond me!

LM: How much life do you think is left in Linux?

Torvalds: I'd be surprised if they used it in the 22nd Century.

LM: But will they use it for all of the 21st?

Torvalds: We'll see.

LM: How many speeches a year do you give?

Torvalds: Four or five.

LM: How many e-mails do you receive a day?

Torvalds: A hundred and fifty.

LM: Is that all?

Torvalds: That's without being on a single mailing list.

LM: Do you get a lot of spam?

Torvalds: I don't care about spam. Some people say all they get in their mailbox is spam. They're real easy to handle -- I get 10 of them a day, and I don't even notice them. The hard work is getting the hundred mails sent to me personally and ignoring them.

LM: I heard you were recently invited to a party thrown by the king of Finland.

Torvalds: Wrong -- Finland doesn't have a king! Finland has a president. The Finnish Independence Day Ball is the social event of the year and I was one of the most popular people there. It's like Christmas at the White House, except it's done with class. What happens is that on the sixth of December, which is Finish Independence Day, you have 2,000 people who get into the president's castle. And you have live coverage on two separate TV channels, one in Swedish and one in Finnish, for three hours. And people actually watch it -- and I was there! It was a lot of fun. Not because the party was fun, but because I used to watch the event on TV myself when I was young!

LM: Are your parents now famous for being your parents?

Torvalds: It used to be that a lot of people would know my Dad -- he's a journalist and he knows a lot of people. So a lot of people used to say, "You're the son of Nils." And I'd say, "Yes." Well, now he tells me people ask, "Are you the father of Linus?"

LM: What was it in your experience growing up that allowed you to do what you did?

Torvalds: I think the main thing is that education is essentially free in Finland. You have almost free education up to university level. It may not be MIT, but it certainly is a hell of a lot better than the average just about everywhere else. And health care is free. It's fairly socialized there -- by American standards that's a bad thing! But if you come from that kind of culture, it's not a big deal when you've created a program to just make it available to others, because as a student you don't have to worry. You pay $60 a year for tuition. I think that's important -- the kind of freedom that gives you.

LM: Aren't you Swedish?

Torvalds: I really am Finnish. You can't call me Swedish just because I speak Swedish. It's like being Swiss and speaking French -- you're still Swiss. But it also means that you're much more open to the Anglo-Saxon culture because the language is much closer to English. I started reading English books when I was 10 or 11. It was not such a big deal to move to the U.S. I don't know if that made much a difference for Linux development, but it means there is more of an openness to the world.

LM: How about the way technology is nurtured in Finland?

Torvalds: It's more an issue of the importance you give to technology. You have these stereotypes, such as that Jews are supposed to think that education is very important. There's a stereotype about Finns, that they are kind of like Germans. They're supposed to work very well and think that education is important. It's like a small country of Jews! [Laughs.] There's a real acceptance of new technology, because that's what people do. Right now Nokia is the symbol of being Finnish -- a lot of people work for Nokia not because they get paid particularly well for doing it but because they like working for the symbol of Finland. But even before then, high technology was considered something you should have. I moved from Helsinki to Silicon Valley, which is supposed to be the high technology mecca of the world. But when I moved, my Internet connection became much worse. In my banking, instead of doing everything electronically, I had to use these checks. Those are things that Finns haven't used in 15 years!

LM: At what point did you realize Linux was becoming a big deal for the world, and when did you realize you were becoming a celebrity?

Torvalds: It all happened so gradually. The only point where I kind of went, "Wow," was early 1992, when it went from me knowing five other people who ran Linux occasionally to suddenly maybe 200 people who used it often. Suddenly I didn't know all the people that used it! But there wasn't a point where I said, "OK, I'm changing the world now."

LM: So what happens if you get hit by a bus?

Torvalds: Then I don't care. [Smiles.]

LM: But if I'm betting my business on Linux, I care.

Torvalds: The last stable release for the last year hasn't been maintained by me. That part isn't interesting any more. I didn't want to be there as a maintainer for a product that wasn't technically interesting, but where you just had to make sure it was stable. Alan Cox maintained the last stable release. I haven't done anything at all for 2.0 in a year. When a bug is found,Alan sends me a patch, and I sprinkle holy penguin pee on it, and it magically becomes official. If I died tomorrow because a bus struck me -- which is highly unlikely, because there aren't many buses here -- what would happen is psychologically a lot of people would be running in circles screaming. And a lot of people would feel nervous about Linux, and maybe that would delay a few Linux projects by a year or so. But what would happen eventually is that Alan Cox or someone else would pick it up.

LM: Why did you choose Tux [the Linux penguin] as the mascot?

Torvalds: I never named it -- it doesn't officially have a name. Three years ago, people thought Linux was getting corporate and needed a logo. Well, you know what it's like when really clueless people try to come up with a logo -- you get a really bad logo! People said, "We want something like the Windows flag logo." I said, "No way. I'm not getting that corporate." There were a lot of bad designs being thrown around. Then one day I happened to see a penguin by this British cartoonist -- a big fat penguin with a fish in his hand. That gave me the idea. What you really want is a cuddly animal that doesn't even try to be corporate. It tries to be nice and lovable. And I like penguins, so it's a fat penguin sitting down. I can't draw for the life of me, so the way I got people to draw it was to send out a description of what I wanted. I wanted to have fat penguin sitting down, and you can see that it's just gorged itself on herring, or had the greatest sex in its life. And that's the Linux logo.

LM: What's next for you and for Linux?

Torvalds: What's next is that I hope to take a vacation! After that I will continue looking at the 2.2 release, because you need to maintain it a while. Nothing is bug-free so we will have to follow it for a while. That's my plan for the next month or two. And then there's Transmeta. I may take a vacation from Linux even though it won't be a vacation from Transmeta.

LM: In terms of Linux, what are your priorities?

Torvalds: There are a few interesting things that people are doing, like clustering and scaling to a large number of nodes.

LM: You said you have to deal with a lot of crazy people asking you things. What was the craziest?

Torvalds: I'm not going to talk about them, because they could recognize themselves! I get some really nice people with some very outlandish proposals though, and people who have ideas about using Linux for really good things. I was once approached by someone who was interested in using Linux for teaching in Third World countries. Of course, I would be happy if they did that! But that's not how my life is going to be spent -- because if I did something like that, I wouldn't be doing Linux.

 

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Lee Gomes covers technology for the Wall Street Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].