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Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers
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Cisco iQ Q&A with Linux Founder Linus Torvalds The Charlie Rose Interview
Rose: Did anybody come to you and say, Look, you can be as rich as Bill Gates?
Torvalds: They have. Later. Not during the first version. Because, it was a very limited system at first. But, sure, people did later on—especially when Linux started taking off. And people really hadn’t gotten the idea of open source. People said, “Why did you do that?’’ Especially in the United States, but also in Finland. People just did not understand the concept of creating a program because you like programming, and they did not understand the concept of Hey, sure, I like money, but on the other hand I’m a programmer, I will get paid.
It’s not as if programmers go hungry in this world. So, I wasn’t worried about money and making money. At the same time, I’d done this project for myself. I didn’t want to commercialize it because I didn’t want to go through the headaches. And I had no incentive to.
Rose: There’s another thing, too, which I know you understand. I take it from the USA Today quote on the back of the book. It says, “Linus Torvalds is a lot like Bill Gates. Both are about the same height.’’ Which I love.
Torvalds: I like that quote.
Rose: You know, the point is that’s about the only thing you two have in common. Other than an interest in technology and being smart. I mean, those are the main things. But someone once said about Bill Gates, “He’s more Rockefeller than Edison.’’
Torvalds: Absolutely.
Rose: And you’re more Edison than Rockefeller.
Torvalds: To get where Bill Gates is today, he needed to be the business guy who knew about technology. I was the technology guy who had no clue about business.
Rose: And still are? Or not?
Torvalds: Well, I’ve seen a lot of the businesses grow up around Linux. So, I comment on business when people ask me. But, quite frankly, I’m still clueless.
Rose: Is it a smart question or a stupid question to ask, Will Linux supplant Windows?
Torvalds: It’s a hard question to answer. I don’t know if it’s a smart question to ask.
Rose: Why is it hard to answer? I mean, will Linux just be a niche operating system?
Torvalds: I think Linux has a very strong future on the desktop actually. Linux already has a quarter of the Web-server market or more, so in certain markets Linux is very strong today.
The desktop, obviously for a lot of reasons, is a very interesting market. And it’s also, very obviously, a market that Microsoft completely dominates today and makes a lot of money dominating. And it’s a market that a lot of people have tried to enter. I mean, Apple. IBM tried with OS/2. A lot of the Unix vendors tried. And the only reason your average person doesn’t even know that they tried is that they failed so horribly.
The reason I think Linux actually has a chance—and why I feel in five years, the situation will be different—is that Linux kind of works around the market. A lot of people are very interested in desktops, so a lot of people will be working on all the applications going on the desktop, making it look nice.
And you can really see the changes that have been going on in the last few years.
Rose: Would Linux have met its potential without the open-source system?
Torvalds: No, no. People don’t realize what an incredible amount of resources it takes to make just about any software project. I mean, software is hard to write.
You need many programmers even to just do one program, much less create a complete system that you can actually give to people on a CD and say, OK, install this and you’ll have everything you need. You need hundreds, thousands of highly paid professionals to do that. And if I hadn’t made it available on the Internet, that just wouldn’t have happened. And you have big companies—huge companies—that can’t afford to do what Linux has done.
Rose: You have it copyrighted.
Torvalds: I, and all the people have who actually have written code for it, have copyrighted our code. Actually, you don’t have to copyright something. You automatically hold the copyright to whatever work you’ve done.
And what is kind of special about Linux is that it kind of uses a judo trick in copyright law, turning the copyright law against itself by saying that, Sure, we own the copyright to this, but you get to copy it freely. You can do whatever you want with it. You can use it in any way. You can change it in any way.
The only thing we require is that when you change it and you give it to somebody else, you give that somebody else the same rights.
Rose: Suppose that tomorrow you change. You get up tomorrow morning in San Jose, where they’ve got quite a few millionaire-billionaires. All right?
Torvalds: Right.
Rose: Less than they used to have.
Torvalds: A lot less.
Rose: A lot less. And you decide, I’ve had it all wrong. We’ve got this thing. We’ve created this thing. And enough is enough. I’m going for the bucks now. Is it too late?
Torvalds: It is. I mean, in a very real sense, what I did with the copyright and what I’ve done knowingly has been to try not to hoard the copyrights. So, when somebody else makes changes to Linux, I don’t ask him to assign the copyright to me.
So, I actually don’t have any rights to a lot of the system except the rights that other people are willing to give me, which are the same rights that I’m willing to give other people. So, what you will find is that nobody can control Linux.
I don’t have any more rights than you have. If you wanted to, you could buy a Linux CD. You could get it over the Internet. You could make your own changes. And you could sell it as your version of Linux. And you can make a lot of money doing it. Maybe.
Rose: I could just hear all over America people saying, What did he say? What did he say?
Torvalds: Well, the point is really that it means that everybody is very comfortable with me. Because everybody knows that I can’t force anybody to do anything. I’m known as the kind of spearhead of Linux. I don’t have any power to tell IBM, OK, you’d better do this or I will never work for you again. I can’t do that, which means people trust me because they know I’m powerless.
Rose: That’s true. There is benefit in this. So, what do you want to do?
Torvalds: I want to just do interesting things. That’s what I’ve always done. That’s why I moved 6,000 miles from Finland to Silicon Valley. I wanted to work for a company that wasn’t even talking about what it was doing, which a lot of people thought was strange. “Hey, here he goes from open source to working for this commercial company. And they’re so closed they’re not even saying what they’re doing.’’
Rose: Right. This is a company partially owned by Paul Allen, isn’t it?
Torvalds: Well, that generated some really interesting rumors. He’s been bought out. The reason I did it was that I felt that Transmeta was doing something really interesting and something that I wanted to do. That’s something fun.
Rose: I should ask you this simply for the record. What’s the future of Linux over the next five years?
Torvalds: I don’t know. I don’t control the thing. The single nicest thing about Linux, as far as I’m concerned, has been how it has evolved in ways I hadn’t expected it to. People are doing things with Linux that I never envisioned. People are doing things with Linux that I’m frankly not that interested in, and that’s fine. And it’s very interesting to see how people use Linux even if they use Linux in ways that I would never use it.
If I were to make a prediction right now, which I’m not going to, if that prediction actually came true, I’d be really disappointed.
Rose: Because it ought to be unexpected.
Torvalds: Yes, a lot of the fun has been that people have done things I never expected.
Rose: What’s the best and worst thing you can say about Windows?
Torvalds: Well, I don’t know. I’m actually not a big Microsoft basher.
Rose: I didn’t ask you to bash ’em. I asked you to tell me the best and worst thing.
Torvalds: Well, you did ask me to say something bad about them.
Rose: No, no. I asked you to say what’s the best and worst thing you can say about Windows.
Torvalds: The best thing is that it’s very, very widely available. And people are very used to it.
Rose: Let’s try damning with faint praise, sir.
Torvalds: Well, no. But I mean the way people work is that they don’t care if something is good or bad. They care . . .
Rose: It sells.
Torvalds: No, no. They care if it’s something they’re comfortable with. I mean, even the people who curse Windows. I know a number of Windows users who hate the system. They curse how it crashes, that you have to save every time before you print. Everybody complains.
They’re still happy because they’re used to it. Right? That’s why Microsoft is so successful. Microsoft doesn’t even need to improve Windows that much because they still have 100 million people who are comfortable with it.
Rose: I can tell you the best thing you can say about Microsoft is that it is out there trying to figure out where the future is. That is what Microsoft is doing.
Torvalds: They’re very good at marketing. They’re very good at trying to see What do we have to do to sell this? The bad part about it is that it does have a huge market share. And that means that it can be lazy, sort of. They don’t have much competition on the desktop, which means that they have very little incentive to really fix some of the problems it does have.
Rose: What do you think of .Net and XML?
Torvalds: Who knows? .Net, I think, is a way to try to sugarcoat the fact that Microsoft is trying to move its whole business into this pay-as-you-use kind of thing. And I don’t know. When I have a house, I’d rather own my house and take the problems than rent it. And I think the same is true about software.
SiliconValley.com: An interview with Linus Torvalds(Jul 02, 2001)
Linus Interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air Today(Jun 04, 2001)
Silicon.com: It's "Linus Week"(May 15, 2001)
NE
Online: "On Being Linus"(Apr 27, 2001)
LinuxWorld: An interview with Linus Torvalds: Free, as in beer(Feb 09, 2001)
CRN:
CRN Interview: Linus Torvalds(Jan 30, 2001
News Linus Partying hard over Linux 2.4 Linus on 2.4 kernel release
here's what the father of Linux and owner of the Linux trademark, Linus Torvalds, emailed back when interrupted in the midst of his celebrations following his release of the long-awaited Linux 2.4.0 kernel on Thursday evening. (His comments have been edited slightly.)
Q: With 2.4, is Linux an even more viable contender to Unix and Windows 2000? What does Linux 2.4 have that these operating systems don't, in your opinion? Torvalds: With questions like that, how are you ever going to write an interesting article? 'Is Linux an even more viable contender ... ?' What do you expect me to say? Give you the standard boring press-release about how we're changing the world, how we've innovated more things than those ancient Chinese dynasties with their gunpowder thing, and how everybody and their pets are going to live happily ever after thanks to the new release?
Blaah.
Face it, "Home and Garden" is probably more interesting. You could write about how January is a good time to plant tulips, or something (but you'd better check that fact from somebody else first--otherwise you'd probably be hit by a class-action suit from tulip-growers everywhere after they all die).
The big things that Linux brings, regardless of version, is the fact that you can tailor it to your needs, you're not bound by any particular vendor, and you can rest safe in the knowledge that there are no backdoors etc. For those big kinds of things, the new release doesn't matter one whit.
Where it matters is obviously the technology, and there's a lot of updates. Somebody has made a list of what changed since 2.2.x, but as I haven't used a 2.2.x kernel in a long time, I forget myself. Much of the 2.4.x features are just improving the infrastructure: memory management is much improved, and as a result you'll see Linux scaling better both up and down. PCi infrastructure, PnP (Plug and Play), hotplug (which covers stuff like cardbus, USB and hotplug PCI--they all share much of the same infrastructure).
Things like that are what matters to me personally: making sure that Linux continues to improve as a strong base to build on for others. There's a lot of other details, of course, like improved drivers etc, but the infrastructure stuff is what I personally care about.
He's not depressed Q: Are you sick to death of being the keeper of the Linux kernel flame? Any thoughts of passing the Linux kernel torch to Alan Cox (Torvalds' right-hand man who maintains and helps develop the Linux kernel) or others for a while?Torvalds: This comes up every once in a while. Usually because somebody thinks my self-ironic postings are a sign of me being mentally depressed and constantly thinking about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, or something. Yes, it happened with the 2.4.0 release too (it's kind of amusing seeing the posts on Slashdot (The Linux enthusiast Web site Slashdot.org) that worry about my release posting being "a bit down"--getting a release out is anything but depressing.
But the fact is that while people don't seem to follow my humor (I know, I should really take the hint and stop), I really do like doing Linux. That doesn't mean I enjoy every single aspect of it, or that I'm constantly slap-happy about it, but it's who I am, and it's what I do.
Part of the reason I enjoy it is that I've never had any trouble letting go of the stuff I don't find enjoyable. So others handle stable release maintenance, and others handle even large portions of the development kernel maintenance--the parts that I personally don't care that strongly about.
And I'll certainly continue to 'farm things out'--having others maintain the things that I don't have the heart for. I think that a lot of the talk about the 'succession' is due to this--people see the project growing, and see other people having a large impact, and don't realize that it's already long since grown past being just 'Linus.'
For example, I didn't make a press release. I made something quotable instead, and I'll leave the real press releases to the companies and other interested parties. Maybe we'll even see a journalist that makes a story that isn't based on a press-release, but on his or her own digging and ruminations.
I hope that in another few years, people will still remember me, but they'll also consider me more of a traditional 'technical lead' person and 'senior architect,' rather than 'Mr Linux.' At that point, the worry about succession will have died out--not because it happened, but because people got over that notion of me being all that special.
THAT's what I'm aiming for. The ability to be 'just' the technical guy some day. I'm in no real hurry, and I'm convinced it will happen, so I'm not worrying. You'll just have to find the next quotable wьnder-kid to spice up your stories ;)
Encore, encore Q: What are you going to do for an encore--first, to celebrate, and second, to move Linux ahead even further?
Torvalds: We'll probably have a delayed house-warming-party (yeah, it's just eight months since we moved--kernel releases aren't the only thing that are delayed at the Torvalds residence ;) with a beer- and pool-party. The 'hit the white ball with a stick' kind, not the 'swim' kind. On a Linux front, for the first few months I will just have to try to delay the inevitable flood of pent-up patches. People want to start doing wild and crazy things immediately, when the reality is that for a few months we just need to take it calm and make sure that everything is in its place. I don't even want to plan 2.5.x or 3.0 at this point yet.
30th Anniversary Interviews with Linus Torvalds "On Being Linus"
Q: How about opening up Transmeta CMS (Code Morphing Software - editor) software as Open Source?
A: We discussed it at length inside Transmeta, especially among the engineers. One of the issues, this is the usual issue, in all cases, people were nervous about what would happen. So we open sourced part of what we do, but we haven't open sourced CMS itself. The question is maybe still on the table, but it's not actually discussed.
Q: You prefer to work on Open Source but you're not going to be dogmatic about it?
A: Yes, if I do something for fun, if I do something because it's my interest and if I don't have any other external issues, I'm going to Open Source it. But no, I'm not religious about it. I think that Open Source is the almost certainly the best way to get the best technology. It's not necessarily the best way to get a company where it wants to be, always. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand, sometimes they don't. So you have to make that position. In my opinion, it's not my decision to make.
... ... ...
Q: Especially on the Japanese side, many engineers feel pride about their work when they produce a successful product that is producing revenue for the company. How about yourself? What areas about your work that gives you the most satisfaction?
A: Some people just like to program. I think that's programming for its own sake. And to a large degree, to me most programs are in the end only as useful as people actually find them. I still program just for fun, but at the same time, a lot of the satisfaction, at least these days, comes from fixing a real problem for a real person who couldn't get his work done because of something or maybe we added a feature that somebody really needed. So in that sense, it's not about selling well or generating money. But it's the same kind of thing. But I still think that a lot of the pride comes from knowing that you did something the right way, even if people don't even notice. You know you could have worked around the problem some other way, but the pride is in knowing that you did the clever thing, you fixed it for good.
Q: We are also asking all of our interviewees for our anniversary issue this same question: what do you see as the most exciting things that have happened to the IT industry in the last three decades?A: I've been barely alive for the last three decades. I would just say Moore's Law. It's not any specific feature. It's just the fact that things just improve so much and became so much cheaper. It's not a thing, maybe that's a bad answer. But I think it's something that the industry has had for the last three decades and probably will have for three more decades. Eventually, it will have to stop. So in that sense, I think it's something that has been interesting and is fairly unique to this particular timeframe.
CNN.com - Sci-Tech - A 'free' interview with Linus Torvalds - February 12, 2001
IDG) -- I've wanted to interview Linus Torvalds for some time, but with the holiday season, his new baby, and the release of 2.4 already on his plate, I knew my chances were slim at best. Timing is everything, it seems. Now that things are somewhat back to "normal," whatever that is, I tried a direct approach and appealed to his finer instincts. I've owed him a beer for almost 2 years now, so I offered him a case of Guinness in exchange for an interview. It worked.
LinuxWorld.com: After predicting that you would pass the kernel development baton to Alan Cox this year, I read an interview of yours in which you put that notion to rest, attributing such speculation to people mistaking your humor for burnout. I admit that's where I went wrong. But along the same line, is there any sort of plan for how Linux kernel development would proceed if you were kidnapped by aliens from outer space, or otherwise became unavailable?
Linus Torvalds: Oh, there's a lot of confusion here, probably because a lot of people get so hung up about "ownership transfer," when I personally don't think such a notion even exists in Linux.
I will hand over the baton to Alan Cox this year, the same way I did for 2.0.x and 2.2.x -- he's really good at maintaining the stable kernels, he seems to enjoy it, and people trust him.
My handing 2.4.x over to Alan Cox doesn't mean that I step down -- it's just me knowing that what I like most is the development kernels, and while I revel in 2.5.x with new features, etc., I don't have the time or the inclination to also maintain the stable kernel at the same time.
This, I think, is what people have a hard time realizing. It's not about one person, and I've never done everything (well, strictly speaking I did do everything in Linux during most of 1991, but I got out of that "Linus is in charge of everything" mentality at the first moment I humanly could).
So I'm likely to never "pass the baton" in the way people expect -- I'm not the CEO who gives up leadership. I'm more the technical lead who concentrates on one thing, and it has just happened to be the most visible thing. The way the leadership has evolved, and will continue to evolve, is that others handle other issues -- to the point where I'm already just one of many. I'm just the most visible one, and the one whose decisions most people tend to respect.
LinuxWorld.com: What is your take on the recent series of pronouncements by Microsoft executives that "Linux is doomed?" Do you think such attacks hurt the Linux community or make it stronger? Do you think their statements say anything about Microsoft's perception of Linux?
Linus Torvalds: I don't think they hurt Linux, nor do I think it makes us stronger. I think Microsoft has traditionally been, and pretty much continues to be, a nonissue for Linux development.
Obviously, on a marketplace level Microsoft matters a lot. But I don't care. And neither do most of the people I actually work with. The latest blathering from some random executive doesn't really matter. Linux did fine when Microsoft ignored it, Linux will do fine when Microsoft disses it.
LinuxWorld.com: Your appearance in the Golden Penguin Bowl at LWCE was the most fun that many of us had at the show. Do you agree that Linux trade shows are not as much fun as they used to be, and if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Linus Torvalds: The [Linux] trade shows are certainly pretty much just trade shows. Probably still slightly more fun than many other trade shows, but hey, what do you really expect from a show where people want to sell to business crowds? It's never going to be something like the Carnival at Rio, and you should just accept that fact.
I have certainly accepted it. I still go, but I don't do the keynotes, I don't do the boring stuff, I just go there to have what fun I can make myself. There's a lot of fairly interesting technical conferences still going on, and quite frankly, if you want the kind of guerrilla fun, you'll need to go to local Linux users groups, etc.
On the whole, I think the trade shows are a good thing -- they may be getting more attention than they necessarily deserve because they are splashy and huge, but apart from that they don't really detract from anything else -- and they do give the people who need trade shows the outlet to stand around in suits and ties. They don't mean that you can't go to technical conferences or have your own hobby groups.
LinuxWorld.com: What were you happiest to see included in Linux 2.4, and why?
Linus Torvalds: I'm happiest about the cleanups we did at a memory management and filesystem management level. The things the infrastructure can do these days is incredible -- and the fact that it's actually faster, in addition to being more flexible and intelligent, is really wonderful.
Basically, 2.4.0 cleaned up and improved a lot of core areas, to the point where I no longer worry about them, and we have a pretty much clean slate for 2.5.x. That's not to say that we don't have other things that we want to clean up, but what I'm really happy about is that we didn't have any "half-measure" release. The things I wanted fixed for 2.4.0 were truly fixed, and ended up being better than I had hoped for. As such, it ends up being a clean platform for tackling some of the other issues I still want figured out.
LinuxWorld.com: What do you most want to see in the next major release of Linux, and why?
Linus Torvalds: There's a few things queued up, the most noticeable of them being to finish up the ACPI stuff (which is in 2.4.x, but in an experimental stage), doing major real clustering and NUMA support, and just seriously revisiting some of the I/O path issues. Most of them tend to be fairly well-defined goals, which makes things easier.
Of course, the real fun is in what surprising things come up. Which, by definition, I won't know yet.
LinuxWorld.com: As I've read over the archived email debate between you and Tanenbaum on the relative merits of the Minix and Linux designs, I'm struck by how easily you can express strong opinions without making it personal. Certainly, leading a diverse group of brilliant hackers from around the globe to a successful release time and time again is a Herculean task. I know that you claim to be "a bastard" and not to care what other people think or want, but don't you think your ability to lead developers is at least as important in the history of Linux as your code?
Linus Torvalds: I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.
I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose -- there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime.
Of course, that's not always true. I've alienated my share of people too. I've gotten too upset for my own good on some issues. But on the whole, I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.
And that, after all, is the point of being a leader.
LinuxWorld.com: Ten years from now, what do you want to be doing (or not doing) and where do you think Linux will be then?
Linus Torvalds: You're asking me way too hard questions. I honestly have no idea.
I didn't have any idea 10 years ago when I started, so I'm convinced that not having a clue about where we'll be in another 10 years is a good thing. I'm not limiting myself with any artificial goals.
LinuxWorld.com: Raising a family (congratulations on the latest!), working at Transmeta, leading the Linux revolution, and attending to dreary chores like this interview, for which I have pledged an entire case of Guinness, how in the world do you have time to do it all? Do you ever read, watch movies, or go to the park with your kids? Do you consider the Silicon Valley home now?
Linus Torvalds: I do consider SV to be home, and sure, I have time for other things than just work. We get a babysitter and go out for a movie every week, and I try to take a few days off every once in a while just to lie down with some not-so-literary work of horror/science fiction/fantasy or whatever. And my pool playing is steadily improving.
The secret to not getting burned out is to play at working hard, and not taking things too seriously. See above.
LinuxWorld.com: Have you had any heroes or idols -- in software or any other fields -- along the way? If yes, who were they and what did you admire about them?
Linus Torvalds: Few heroes, I'm afraid. In computers, Kirk McKusick and Steve Wozniak are kind of heroes. But on the whole, I think I've cared less about "how can I be more like Xxxx" than about just trying to do what I think is fun, interesting, and right. Motto in life: "Do unto others what you would like others to do unto you. And have fun doing it."
LinuxWorld.com: Looking back, has Linux turned out the way you hoped 10 years ago? If not, what would you change to make it do so?
Linus Torvalds: It turned out much more interesting, and much more fun than I could ever have imagined. I can't imagine anything that I could have done better, even in hindsight. Luckiest bastard alive, that's me.
You owe me a case of beer. Sucka'.
2001 Nikkei Electronics Interview
*30th Anniversary Interview with Linus Torvalds
On Transmeta Nikkei Electronics: How did you get your job at Transmeta? Linus Torvalds: I knew an engineer here at Transmeta who was originally from Sweden, and he'd been a long-time Linux user. He went back to Sweden on a personal trip, and, once you get to Sweden, it's very easy to come over to Finland where I lived at the time. He actually came over just to talk about Linux, and we hooked up. He told me that I can't tell you what I'm working on, but if you're interested, I can talk to some people. So they flew me out here. This was the end of '96. Linux wasn't that well-known. It was well-known in the technical community, but it wasn't a huge deal. Your average person on the street had never heard about Linux. So I had to sign an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement). Everybody had to sign an NDA before they came into Transmeta. Transmeta flew me over from Finland without me actually knowing what they did. I was here for just two days I think, and the first day basically was interesting. But at the same time, I felt it was rather crazy. In '96 at Transmeta, I think we had five software engineers.
A: Only five people when I joined. And we didn't have any actual hardware. So everything was done in simulations. Simulations at that time booted Windows 3.1. This was '96, '97, so Windows 3.1 was kind of the normal Windows operating system at the time. And the demonstration at the time was to run Solitaire. That was pretty much the only thing you could do. And so after the first day I felt, okay, these people are crazy. But when I came back the second day I said, hey, it might just work. I mean it did work, but back then it wasn't that obvious. But I felt that the fact that people were a bit crazy was kind of a good sign, that it mean that people were doing something new and unexpected and on the second day, I was actually fairly excited about the position.
A: I was just thinking about some of the optimizations
I could see us doing. It takes awhile to kind of understand the
architecture, and realizing that the chip is actually kind of a small
database engine. And it's a very limited database. From an OS designer
viewpoint, it's kind of interesting what we actually do under the
covers. So that was probably what made me the most excited, just
thinking about what you can do with an architecture like ours.
|
| *30th Anniversary Interview with Linus Torvalds
Q: Why did you decide to join a hardware company and not a software company like Oracle or Microsoft? A: Why didn't I join Microsoft? [LAUGHTER] We are a hardware company, but we do have a fairly strong software side, and I've never been on the hardware side of the company. It's been kind of interesting to be at a company where hardware is so important because it gives a different view to some of the problems. So in that sense, I did join a software company. The thing that made it interesting was I still think that Transmeta is one of those companies that are doing things that nobody else is doing. There are parallels to Linux in the sense that one of the reasons, actually maybe the major reason, why I started doing Linux in the first place was actually to learn about the x86 architecture, and through that, I had a lot of knowledge about the details of how an x86 works. There are a lot of details which, even if you're a programmer using PCs, you don't need to know. You don't need to know how paging works, what the bids and the segment tables are. So I had actually the right kind of background for Transmeta and Transmeta was actually doing something that was very interesting to me because it was one of the reasons I'd gotten into Linux in the first place, namely looking at x86 from a software viewpoint. This meant that I could actually do something interesting. Actually it was a very natural fit for me at the time.
A: Not really. To me even the Transmeta thing didn't feel like an interview. I came over to listen to what crazy things people were doing. I didn't have to get a job. I took it more that, okay, maybe these people are doing something really interesting and maybe I'd like to be part of that. So I didn't actually have a curriculum vitae or anything like that. When the word spread that I was taking a job with Transmeta, there were a few companies who said, okay, if you're going away from the university, we'll take you. And I never actually interviewed of any of them because none of them really offered anything interesting. Some of them basically said come here and do whatever you want to do, right? Which a lot of people think is the dream job, right? But what was interesting, what made Transmeta much more interesting than that was the fact that, hey, I was already doing what I wanted to do. What Transmeta offered was a very specific goal and something different that I hadn't ever done before.
A: One of the things we've certainly noticed is that
software people are less controlled. Because if you have a bug, you can
fix it, and it's fixed in the next version. In hardware, if you have a
bug, it takes half a year until the next tapeout (initial chip -
editor). I think hardware people tend to be much more careful,
[LAUGHTER] while software people tend to be more let's try this. I think
it works fairly well. But there certainly have been cases where software
people say, hey, this is really hard to do in software. Couldn't you
just redesign your hardware and do it this way and we'd be really happy
and the hardware people say, mmm, that sounds dangerous. I think
software people also, especially the people who have been most involved
in defining the architecture, have become more careful. But that's been
fun sometimes. |
| 30th Anniversary Interview with Linus Torvalds
On Silicon Valley Linus: Well, that's kind of what the advanced development group does. And that's one of the reasons I'm in that group is because we can think of slightly crazy things that may not actually be useful in practice. I like moving to Silicon Valley, but at the same time, I have to say I almost expected more of Silicon Valley in some sense because I haven't seen any crazy projects. I mean last year you saw tons of crazy Internet startups. However, they were crazy in the wrong way. They weren't interesting technology crazy. They were just the market is crazy crazy. And I still think that from what I've seen at Transmeta, it is the most interesting project out here. Maybe crazy is the wrong word. It's just that in order to be really interesting, it has to be something that people think is slightly off the wall. It's not something every day boring, right? So when I say crazy, I mean that in a good way. Don't get me wrong.
Linus: No. I mean times were really good two years ago. You could get money for anything. So in that sense it's calmed down a bit. I think it's really mainly the fact that the only company I came to look at here was Transmeta. I kind of got this notion that the whole Valley is 10,000 companies just like Transmeta and it turned out that it isn't. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but at the same time, a lot of it is just engineering. Which is good, but it's not really exciting.
Linus: I really like it here. It started out as being a safe place to go because when you move to another country, you really don't know how you'll adapt to a new work environment and things like that. Silicon Valley seemed to be a safe bet in that, okay, if Transmeta doesn't work out, there's a lot of other stuff going on in this area. So it started out that way, knowing that a lot of the technology was done here. Then we got used to the weather which was a big factor. And there's actually a lot of things you can do here. There's a surprising amount of nature not that far away. You can go windsurfing, you can do stuff like that, which I never do because I'm too busy.
Linu: I have three daughters now. The oldest one was born in Finland. She was 10 weeks when we moved. She doesn't even realize the difference. My wife, it took her maybe half a year to adjust. But we're adjusted. NE: Do you want to stay here forever? Linus: Forever is a long time. [LAUGHTER] But the only thing I really don't like is that coming from Finland, there's a lot of space. Finland is not very densely populated mostly because nobody sane wants to live there. That's unfair. But it's a bit too cold. So the only thing that really disturbs me about this area is that it's too crowded. House prices are ridiculous and things like that. But at the same time, there's so many things that make me like this area despite all the power outages.
Q: When you working on Linux in Finland and you decided to make it an Open Source project, what were your expectations and reasoning at that time? A: Looking back it looks like a huge decision and something I would have thought about a lot, but it wasn't. I was basically communicating a lot on the Internet with technical groups and people. Back then, in '91, '90, most Internet people were at universities which meant that the whole philosophy on the Internet was fairly university-minded. The best reason for making Linux available at that time was probably just because it fit the culture. I didn't have very high expectations. I wanted people to give some feedback, but from a market share standpoint, I didn't expect it to make all that much of a difference. It was more that I know some technical people who would be interested in operating systems. And I wanted to get feedback from them.
A: Very few things were really that surprising at the time. It's not that I expected this to happen because I didn't. But all the steps were fairly small. For example, just the fact that Oracle ported its database to Linux was a huge thing. That was something that suddenly made people realize that this thing actually can work in major commercial places. And yet the rumors about Oracle porting had been going around for two years. So it wasn't a huge surprise to me that it happened. Looking back, it's really surprising that everything worked so well, right? But none of the details were that strange.
A: Actually, the biggest surprises were probably fairly early on, in early '92 when I'd only released it maybe three, four months before. I released it expecting some of the people I'd already talked to to take a look. Then at some point, I just noticed that there were a lot of people actually using this and that the people using it were people I didn't even know. That was probably psychologically the biggest surprise. But at the same time, looking back it was maybe 50 or 100 people who were using it. Now that sounds really, really small. But at the time, it felt like a lot. Basically it's a big jump to go from one to 100. But then from 100 to 10 million, that's big numbers. [LAUGHTER] |
| *30th Anniversary Interview with Linus Torvalds
Q: Looking at your decision, when you decided to release Linux as an Open Source project, you were a student. That tends to be the most carefree period of most people's lives. Now you've got a family that you have to support and if you were in the same situation, if you were to come up with a new project like Linux would you have released it as Open Source? A: I would actually. I can see where you're going, but actually when I released and did most of the early Linux work, I was a student, but I was also a TA (Teacher Assistant-editor) at the university and the most important part maybe was the fact that I wasn't nervous about the fact that I would get paid. I'm not trying to make money per se, but at the same time, I wasn't having trouble actually being fed. Whatever students eat, drink, pizza and beer, was plentiful. And even now I don't have this feeling that okay, I need to think about money all the time. I still do computers because they're fun. It so happens that they're also my work. But I still do my work, get paid for that, and if I did something on the side, which I would do just because it's fun, I'd do that Open Source. Considering that Linux ended up paying for my house, I have made more money out of Linux than out of my real work, even though it wasn't really meant to be that way. It just happened. Q: How did Linux pay for your house? A: Linux companies basically gave me friends and family stock, and I was the most friendly of the lot, [LAUGHTER] and it was like no ties attached. They said, hey, thanks, and here's a few options, and maybe they'll be worth something some day. And everybody was laughing about that and not actually believing it, and then -- A: The IPO's came around. A: Uhm-hum.
A: Yes, I've sold the stocks. I'm not stupid. I sold when the market was crazy. I said I'd rather have a house than worry about where the stock market is going. Q: When you look at Linux as it is now, obviously it's a major part of the infrastructure for companies. There's an industry that's grown up around it. Do you feel that it's still your baby? Or do you feel more like that you're the father of the bride who has just given his daughter away? A: Some of both. For example when I go to a big Linux conference, say LinuxWorld or something, I don't feel like, hey, I did this. [LAUGHTER] Quite frankly when you walk on the floor it's so far off from anything I did. At that point I feel like hmm, okay, that was my baby and it grew up. But at the same time when it comes to the technology, the kernel itself, that part is still mine. Not all of it because I've always tried to not get in the position where people get irritated at me for being in the way. I control some parts of the kernel and for other parts there are other people who are better at it than I am, then they're maintainers of that part. But certainly the core functionality of the kernel itself is still my baby.
A: No. That was a good thing. That may not have been planned either. I had a plan for calling it Freax. As in "freaks" but also in "free." And I thought I'd call it Freax just because I thought Linux was a bit too egotistical. However, the name Linux stuck. I have a few people I can blame on that. [LAUGHTER] But I'm really happy it stuck because it's a good name. It's a lot better name than Freax which would have been hard to accept in a commercial setting. I think it made things easier from a PR standpoint, especially two years ago when people were talking about Linux versus Microsoft. It made it so much easier to personify Linux as me, Microsoft as Bill Gates. Good against Evil kind of thing. Which made it much easier to write stories. Which shouldn't really matter, but it does, for journalists. The only part I've ever disliked about Linux, is I'm not very good at giving talks. That's the only part that I'm kind of actively trying to get out of. It's not that I try to keep my privacy. It's more that I try to do the things that I find interesting and most of them tend to be staring at the computer for 10 hours a day which kind of implies that I don't want to be that public a person.
Q: Looking at the factors that have made Open Source successful for
developing software, do you think it could apply to other industries,
for example, hardware? A: I don't think hardware is necessarily the best industry to apply it to. I think Open Source is really an issue of information. And information is only useful in areas where the information is the most important thing. In many hardware areas, information is often very expensive. But it's equally expensive sometimes to produce the chips or produce the cards or something like that, so you have a noticeable amount of the expense coming from the actual raw materials.
A: I suspect that's one area where it might be very
interesting. If you look at where the cost is, it is almost never in
making the drug. Eventually -- we haven't reached that point yet -- but
it might be that if you look at genetics and see who is trying to
de-code and understand what it's all about, there's a number of
commercial companies in there, too, but there's a number of
universities. And depending on what happens to the intellectual property
rights in that area, it might well be that a lot of intellectual
property might be more of an Open Source kind of property, if it's
developed at a university, and I think that would be a good thing. But
I'm biased. |
| *30th Anniversary Interview with Linus Torvalds
Q: How about opening up Transmeta CMS (Code Morphing Software - editor) software as Open Source? A: We discussed it at length inside Transmeta, especially among the engineers. One of the issues, this is the usual issue, in all cases, people were nervous about what would happen. So we open sourced part of what we do, but we haven't open sourced CMS itself. The question is maybe still on the table, but it's not actually discussed. Q: You prefer to work on Open Source but you're not going to be dogmatic about it? A: Yes, if I do something for fun, if I do something because it's my interest and if I don't have any other external issues, I'm going to Open Source it. But no, I'm not religious about it. I think that Open Source is the almost certainly the best way to get the best technology. It's not necessarily the best way to get a company where it wants to be, always. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand, sometimes they don't. So you have to make that position. In my opinion, it's not my decision to make. On Being Linus Q: Especially on the Japanese side, many engineers feel pride about their work when they produce a successful product that is producing revenue for the company. How about yourself? What areas about your work that gives you the most satisfaction? A: Some people just like to program. I think that's programming for its own sake. And to a large degree, to me most programs are in the end only as useful as people actually find them. I still program just for fun, but at the same time, a lot of the satisfaction, at least these days, comes from fixing a real problem for a real person who couldn't get his work done because of something or maybe we added a feature that somebody really needed. So in that sense, it's not about selling well or generating money. But it's the same kind of thing. But I still think that a lot of the pride comes from knowing that you did something the right way, even if people don't even notice. You know you could have worked around the problem some other way, but the pride is in knowing that you did the clever thing, you fixed it for good.
A: I've been barely alive for the last three decades. I would just say Moore's Law. It's not any specific feature. It's just the fact that things just improve so much and became so much cheaper. It's not a thing, maybe that's a bad answer. But I think it's something that the industry has had for the last three decades and probably will have for three more decades. Eventually, it will have to stop. So in that sense, I think it's something that has been interesting and is fairly unique to this particular timeframe.
Q: How about in areas other than technology? A: I'd have to say scientists. Like Feineman or
Einstein obviously or Bohr. These kinds of people. A: Maybe Steve Wozniak? People don't remember him as well as Steve Jobs because he was just a technical guy and he got out of Apple when it wasn't interesting to him anymore. But if you had to ask who in my industry I'd like to be like, I would probably say Steve Wozniak. Q: For you, what is the definition of an engineer? A: It's somebody who does it for the technology. So that why I count Steve Wozniak as an engineer. Part of the reason why I mentioned Steve is that I grew up in the timeframe when other computers were competitors to the Apple. So I was aware of all the strange things Apple was doing with their graphics and floppy chips and things like that. That was true engineering. Some of the things that Apple did in those early ages were things that people actually would not have thought possible. That was not what the chips were even meant to do. That's engineering, and that was Steve Wozniak. That was not Steve Jobs. Q: Have you ever met Steve Wozniak? A: Never met him. I know he's around, and he's teaching kids about computers. Q: How about Bill Gates? A: No. He's a business person. Q: He was an engineer. A: I don't think so. He was technical, but if you look where he went, he wasn't at MIT. He was at Harvard. I think math and law or something like that. Yes, he was technically knowledgeable, but he was not an engineer. Q: Have you ever met him before? A: No. We've been to some conferences. Q: Would you like to meet him? A: I don't know what I'd say to him. I'd probably like to meet him. Q: Have you ever thought about what you would like to be remembered for? Something you would like someone to put on your gravestone? You still have a lot of time ahead of you. A: I don't know. I've never been the kind of driven person that some people are. They have a big goal in life and they want to climb Mt. Everest or something. I've never had anything specific like that. And if anything, my gravestone says, Good Guy. I'm okay. Maybe that sounds a bit too goody-goody. It's not that I want to be Mother Theresa. It's more that I want to do something interesting and do it in a way that's respected. Note to Steve Wozniak. E-mail Linus and invite him out for a beer. I think you two will have a lot to talk about.
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Last modified: March 12, 2019
Linus Torvalds
A: That was one of my requirements, that
I'd get to continue doing Linux. I could have done it on my own time. It
just helps a lot, if the company allows me to do it at work time and I
don't have to worry about having to use a different Internet account for
my Linux work and my Work work because it becomes fairly nasty.
A: Very few people in the technology area.
