Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers

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Softpanorama Linus Torvalds' Interviews Collection (2002)
(preserving Linus Torvalds interviews for humanity ;-)

Linux Times An Online Linux Magazine - Linus Torvalds ''Desktop Market has already started'' Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.

Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.

Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?

Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.

In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.

Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?

Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.

I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special ;)

Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?

Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.

And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.

In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.

Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?

Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less conceited.

Preston: When do you think Linux will take over desktop market from Microsoft?

Linus Torvalds: Oh, I think it's started already, it's just slow. You don't realize just _how_ slow it is, unless you've been looking at Linux over the last ten years. People kind of expect it to suddenly be "good enough" and take off like a rocket, but that's not how these things work. It gets better very gradually, and people get used to it very gradually. So I look back ten years, and think about how Linux was back then, and I have to chuckle a bit. The desktop of today is a bit better than it was a year ago, but you don't _really_ see the differences unless you step back a lot more..

Preston: How do you like your new job @ OSDL as a full time Linux contributor?

Linus Torvalds: It's been working out quite well. I work from home, and OSDL provides some infrastructure that allows me to get my work done without having to worry about things. Which is just how I like it ;)

Preston: What's the latest happening in the kernel development?

Linus Torvalds: Oh, it's been more of the same. Worrying about drivers, fixing interfaces to make it harder to write bugs by mistake, and just keeping up with new hardware and new ideas. The kernel is definitely maturing in the sense that a lot of the exciting really _new_ things are all in user space, and the kernel is sometimes called upon to make them easier to work with...

Linux Magazine December 2002 FEATURES The Great Dictator Linus Torvalds: The Benevolent, Brilliant Keeper of the Kernel by Robert McMillan Copyright Linux Magazine ©2002

The Linux kernel project is growing up. New contributors, job delegation, and a source code control system have changed the way the kernel gets hacked. The guy at the center of it all -- Linus Torvalds -- has changed, too. Gone are his days as poster boy for Open Source. He doesn't do Comdex keynotes anymore; he's not on the covers of business magazines; and he rarely gives interviews. No, these days, Linus is all about what he does best: hacking the kernel and keeping a sure and steady hand on the rudder of everyone's favorite project.

LINUX MAGAZINE: Tell us about how your job has evolved in the last few years.

LINUS TORVALDS: One of the things that I wanted to do with Bitkeeper [the source code control system Linus recently adopted] was to see how easy it is to have other people in charge of their own areas. So far, [it's] worked really well with some people. Before, I had to merge patches, and I always did it, but it was still work for me. These days, with those people I know I can work with, it takes a second every week. It's not a big deal anymore. I get an email that says, "Please pull." I pull it. It's done. And that's very convenient.

It works very well within certain subsystems. USB is a perfect example of this. Greg [Kroah-Hartman] just handles all of USB. Nobody even tries to send me USB patches normally. He's the guy. In part, networking and network drivers are the same way.

There is still a problem though. Fundamental patches that aren't clearly in one sub-category still take some work, but there are a few people who handle that, too. Andrew Morton has been really good at memory management, which used to be a major point of contention.

LM: Why was it a point of contention?

LT: There are a lot of people who are interested in memory management. Memory management is just something so fundamental to just about any subsystem. From a user perspective, it's a big deal how you page things up if you're low on memory. But it ends up being a big deal for filesystems, for example, that maintain their journals and have tons of memory for journal data. But then, when the kernel needs memory for other things, the kernel has to have a good way of communicating with the filesystem, saying, "Hey, get rid of that data without the machine coming to a complete halt."

So memory management tends to be caught in the middle of all these different things, which means that it ends up being one of the most complex pieces, and at the same time, the most fundamental. It needs to be 100 percent stable, and at the same time, there are many different people who have different things they want to do with it.

LM: Last year, you switched Linux's virtual memory (VM) code in the midst of a stable release development cycle. That ruffled a lot of feathers. Now that you have some perspective, would you do the same thing again?

TORVALDS: I still think it went about as well as it could go. One of the things about the way it turned out was the fact that it forced people to take a real stand. Without the VM split in 2.4, I don't think anything would have gotten done. That's the reason that I think it was actually good.

LM: Were you thinking that at the time?

TORVALDS: That was the major reason. I mean, everybody had been ragging on the VM system for several months -- this was at 2.4.9. It worked OK, but there were certain loads where it just did not work very well. And there were no solutions in sight. And then Andrea [Arcangeli] came along and said, "If you do this, it fixes the problem." And it did. It broke a lot of stuff, too. It took just two releases to be quite useful again. But it was a big enough change that 50 percent of all kernel developers said, "Hey, that is way out of line. Don't do that." And to some degree that is true, but without [the change] the VM wouldn't have gotten fixed.

And then the Red Hat people stayed at 2.4.9, and suddenly there was this fierce competition going on. The 2.4.9 VM lost every single benchmark out there, so you could point to benchmarks and say, "The 2.4.9 benchmark sucks, and this new kind of radical thing beats the pants off it."

LM: So were you surprised by the reaction at all?

TORVALDS: Some people were more bitter than I expected them to be.

LM: Do you think that we could be in a situation like that again?

TORVALDS: Right now the other issue is the IDE layer, which has a lot of the same issues. The fundamental problem is that most drivers are very independent. There are no connections between different network drivers, which makes it much easier to maintain them. When you make a change to the EEPro driver, you don't want to, by mistake, break two other drivers that just happen to depend on what you've changed. So network drivers rarely have concerns.

In the IDE layer, that's not true. So you have different IDE chipsets assuming different things, and some of them work and some of them don't, and when you try to fix one, you may break another. It's kind of messy.

So during 2.5, I said, "OK, let's go with this radical fairly open rewrite." And again, a lot of people didn't like the instability. In fact, they didn't like it so much that Martin Dalecki, who did the thing, has basically thrown his hands up and said, "OK, I can't take the abuse any more." So that particular rewrite actually ended up going back to the old code just because it takes a certain kind of masochist to actually take the abuse.

The Next Kernel

LM: What will the next kernel version number be? 3.0 or 2.6?

TORVALDS: 2.6. There's a lot of new stuff in the current kernel -- especially scalability work -- but for me, the decision whether it was 2.6 or 3.0 was going to be if there was a big push toward new kinds of architectures, especially NUMA. And there has been some work on that, but most scalability work has been done on SMP. IBM has been doing a really good job, but it's not fundamentally different, so that's why it's 2.6.

LM: When is 2.6 expected?

TORVALDS: The feature freeze is Halloween.

LM: You always pick a memorable date.

TORVALDS: We talked this over at the OLS [Ottawa Linux Symposium]. Once we decided it was October something, you might as well just say Halloween. So Halloween is feature freeze. Practically speaking, the IDE situation, because it seems that we're just going with the old stable code, that's not going to be a big issue. There are a few other issues, which means that after feature freeze there will be a long time before we can do a real code freeze. The major one is async I/O. That is right now one of the major issues that has changed so much, that it had better be there comfortably before the feature freeze. And that's the one that might take a while after the feature freeze to stabilize enough that we can say, "It's a code freeze." So, realistically, it will be at least six months after the feature freeze.

LM: So, improved SMP and async I/O are going to be the two most interesting 2.6 features, in your opinion?

TORVALDS: There are a lot of other things. Actually, fairly recently, Ingo [Molnar], who has been doing most of the scheduling work, and the process related work, started working together with the glibc guys on improving threading. We've had this situation for a long time where Linux has this cloned thread abstraction, and most of userland wants to really see a PT threads-compatible layer. And the glibc translation overhead was horribly bad, and there was nobody who was comfortable with both glibc and the kernel to try to figure out what the right abstraction layers were.

Oracle, and basically all the database vendors want this interface to have big pages. They want to get the OS memory manager out of the way. They want to say, "Hey I want one contiguous area -- 256 meg -- and I want to use all the big page TLB [Translation Lookaside Buffer] features because I know my locality sucks. So I want to have as little a TLB footprint as I can."

LM: These seem like server, not desktop, features.

TORVALDS: The desktop turns out to be mostly about drivers. On the desktop side, most of the work is actually in userspace. So a lot of this stuff, has been people picking up the Xrender extension, and doing some of the 3D graphics work, and doing anti-alias fonts. And none of that has anything to do with the kernel. The 3D graphics has a kernel side to it, but it's not something fundamental. It's just a fairly complex device driver model. So in the kernel, there's not a lot of support needed for desktop uses of the kernel.

Then there's the embedded space. The embedded space has also grown up so much that you don't have to be a 100K kernel to run there, and the standard Linux kernel actually works pretty well. There tends to be ARM support -- which has been ongoing all the time -- and device drivers for it. So there is very little fundamental stuff for the desktop. The threading stuff may actually make a big difference for the desktop, too.

Not His Cup of Itanium

LM: I read a kernel post where you said you were praying that AMD's x86-64 chip architecture would succeed. So what have you got against Itanium?

TORVALDS: I think the main problem with Itanium is that I don't care about the server market that much. To me Itanium is a complete dead end because Intel doesn't even seem to be pushing it into the markets I care about.

One reason I really like the AMD approach -- the way I've read it -- is Optiron is going to be a desktop chip, [and] because of its 64-bit features, [it] can do better in the server market, too. I like that approach a lot more, because I'm a big believer in desktops. That's what I use every single day. I refuse to have a rackmount in my home. I don't want to have a coffee table either. I want to have a standard PC form factor -- smaller if possible. It needs to fit under my desk, and it needs to be fairly quiet, and it needs to be small enough that I don't hit it with my foot by mistake.

I'm actually hoping to get a desktop Itanium 2 soon enough, but I know that's not what most people are going to use. This [Itanium] thing costs several thousand dollars. It's not going to run x86 legacy apps very much, so most people on the desktop won't buy one of those because it's just too expensive for them. It's for very high-end workstations.

The thing is, they've been doing well without me. I've not written a line of Itanium 2 code, and apparently the people who are actually working on Itanium 2 and Linux are really happy. It's integrated. I don't mind. I will support them.

Bloody Thursday

LM: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your job. Transmeta laid off, what, 40 percent of its staff a few months ago?

TORVALDS: Bloody Thursday. I don't think it was 40 percent, but it was close.

LM: What was that like?

TORVALDS: I'm not a manager. I used to be a long time ago, and I just said, "I never want to do it again." But because I'm a Fellow at Transmeta, I actually ended up being one of the people who got to go around and tell people, "OK, I'm sorry but you're laid off." So, I did that to three friends of mine that I'd been working with for over five years.

It was one of those things where it was clear it had to be done. I think I actually preferred being one of the people telling others they had to be laid off, [instead of] just walking around being one of the people staying. Especially, with some of them, it was like, "OK, if somebody has to do this, it might as well be me. It's just better that it's me."

LM: Had you brought people to Transmeta? Did you Encourage friends to get hired there?

TORVALDS: I hadn't actually done that very much. Partly because all my personal friends tended to be from Finland, and a lot of my Linux contacts were there before me. So I didn't have to feel that particular feeling of guilt.

LM: It must feel like such a different world from when you came here.

TORVALDS: It's psychologically very different. But I think that's true in Silicon Valley in general. At least I didn't come in like a lot of people came in, in the last two years. Just as they came in, it was at the height of the craze, and some people had jobs for just a few months, and then they were told, "OK, I'm sorry. It didn't work out after all. Go home."

The Up-and-Comer from Redmond

LM: Did you go to the Microsoft booth at LinuxWorld this year?

TORVALDS: I walked past, and I looked. I mean, they should have shown off what they're good at. I think they were showing off Korn shell running on NT. If you want to run Korn shell, don't run NT.

LM: What do you think they were doing here?

TORVALDS: I have no idea. Maybe Bill has told them that they're going to port all of their software to Linux, so they'd better get used to it. Maybe. Maybe not.

I think it's cheap enough for Microsoft to come there, and maybe they can talk to some people and say, "Use NT instead. We have all the tools. If you like a shell, you can run that." That's what they're doing. It's probably not a big strategic decision.

LM: Maybe it's just a PR stunt.

TORVALDS: Maybe that's it. Maybe they just like being written up in the New York Times... and I'm sure, in Linux Magazine, too.

I found it kind of funny that, they were across the aisle from CodeWeavers, and how the LinuxWorld show guide said they were in a section for small, upcoming companies who hope to grow.

---

Robert McMillan is Editor at Large for Linux Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]

MercuryNews.com 07-04-2003 Linux creator an open source Posted on Fri, Jul. 04, 2003 Torvalds on SCO suit, Microsoft and his exit from Transmeta

Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux operating system, the open source version of Unix that is sweeping through the software world in a direct challenge to Microsoft. He is a technical leader and an outspoken advocate of open source development, which allows software users to develop and modify their own versions of software for free. He spoke candidly with Mercury News staff writer Dean Takahashi about the lawsuit from SCO Group versus IBM (where Big Blue is accused of illegally putting Unix code into Linux), on Microsoft and open source development. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the Open Source Development Lab. Here is an edited transcript:

Q: The SCO Group has sued IBM for illegally contributing Unix code to Linux. Do you believe this episode reveals any vulnerabilities in the open source movement?

A: Not really. Open source software is very visible. That means it's very easy to see if there is something wrong. I think that is a good thing. I think the whole point is that, with the kind of transparency you get with open source, people are a lot less likely to ever have intellectual property issues. I compare it to stealing a car. Do you steal a car in the bright daylight with a lot of people around? Or do you steal a car, go for a joyride at 4 am in the morning when there aren't a lot of people around. With open source, there is a lot of daylight. A lot of people looking at the code. You don't really go around and steal things.

Q: There was some mention of the origins of Linux being murky.

A: There has been a lot of rumor. It's more of an allegation. It's complete crap. Quite the reverse. If you look at murky, it's SCO's allegations that are murky. With Linux code, you can see how it's been developed. You can see who applied patches. You can see when they got applied. It's all in the open.

Q: They were referring to the original creation of Linux.

A: No, it's not an issue. Some of the history might be slightly hard to find, but compared to other projects, it's a lot better documented than any proprietary operating system ever. Most of the stuff that has been on public mailing lists is archived.

Q: How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?

A: There was a lawsuit between AT&T and Berkeley. AT&T sued UC Berkeley for copyright infringement because the Berkeley version of Unix was made available openly with the Berkeley license. It took a few years but it was shown that it wasn't Berkeley that stole code from AT&T but it was AT&T that stole code from Berkeley, removed Berkeley copyrights, and they ended up settling out of court. So there is no judge that has said so officially but it was believed that Berkeley had done nothing wrong. This is the same code at issue. In that case, there was a clear genetic continuation. Now SCO is trying to use the same code that already failed a test once and to apply it to something where there isn't the same genetic continuation.

Q: For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?

A: The origin was all written by me. For the first six months or so I was the only person working on Linux. It took almost a year before there was a major contribution from people outside. It's all original code since day one.

Q: The SCO Group has said that you haven't had the highest respect for intellectual property rights. How do you react to that?

A: That's very normal that you always try to twist the truth in lawsuits. The only part that has been irritating is they make it personal. They are showing my e-mails to the Linux community to the press. They called my approach cavalier because I made a joke in an e-mail. OK. Tough. If they can't take a joke, that's their problem. I think it backfired. Most journalists do have a sense of humor. They didn't mind.

Does it surprise you that Linux is a pawn in a battle between big companies, like IBM and Microsoft?

No. I'm not surprised about lawsuits per se. When there is enough money involved, lawsuits are inevitable. I don't think that's anything strange. To a large degree, and a reason I made it open source in the first place, was I was interested in the technical side, and not the legal and commercial side. It's not a pawn that somebody takes over. That's one of the points. I find it interesting that people have used it in different ways that I didn't envision and also that they're raising issues that I don't care about.

Q: What do you care about?

A: I still care about the technology and the community. The people putting it together. And I do care about if someone has actually copied stuff into Linux that they don't have rights to, I'd be upset about that. I care about software rights. Right now I'm taking a leave. From what it looks like, as long as it is contract rights between SCO and IBM, I don't care at all. IBM can defend themselves. And if IBM ends up having to say OK we did something bad, it's not my problem.

Q: Microsoft took out a license from SCO. Do you think that was necessary and that the timing seemed strange?

A: It's not exactly clear what they licensed. Most people see it as a PR move. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I'm not a lawyer.

Q: Do you worry now that, regardless of who wins the lawsuit, that it will do some damage to the adoption of Linux?

A: What I worry most about is these things tend to drag out. If somebody were to show this is what a judge thinks about this case, I'm fairly confident that Linux is OK. I worry that it will drag out forever.

Q: Can you tell us how Linux evolves?

A: It all boils down to hundreds of different groups. A group can be a huge company that has an agenda. Or it can mean one person at a university working on a research project. They have their own thing they want to fix. All of these people make their modifications, and not all of them are accepted. I see it as a kind of ecosystem. You have survival of the fittest. Some changes work better. Sometimes it is for purely technical reasons. It's just the right thing to do. Sometimes it is for personality reasons. Some people who push their changes are more likely to get things done because they are nicer about it. It's not really centralized. I am at the center, but I don't direct any teams. All these people are trying to pull me in different directions. Some groups pull together in the same direction. It's a very dynamic situation.

Q: Do you think it works well that you have the final say?

A: I think it works well because I don't have the final say. I have this final say in my tree. It is special in that a lot of people trust my tree. So some people will not use it if it is not my tree. That is a minority. But most people end up using various appendages. My tree is really not. Yes I have the final say on my tree. There is always this forking but there is always this joining. There is more forking than there is joining. But that just means that there are all these dead branches that not end up not being interesting. My branch is to some degree, you could think of it as the trunk of the tree. People try to join back into my tree.

Q: Competitively, do you think this controlled chaos works against a company like Microsoft?

A: I think it ultimately the only way to do software. I have arguments why. The main one is the complexity issue. It's very hard for someone who doesn't work like this to keep control of an increasingly complex source base and increasingly complex user base. If you try to control the process too much, you can go straight to the end point where you want to go. That works well if you know where the end point is. If you don't know where it is and you can't control where people want to use your software, it's a very bad thing to have one branch that is very concentrated on one line of development. The best analogy is biological diversity. You have the Linux approach that is fairly diverse and all over the map. Maybe it is not very efficient. But it works very well in the face of complexity and changing circumstances. Changing circumstances will really show that part of that diversity really works. Biology on the other extreme is a very mono culture, which works very well as long as the circumstances stay the same. To some degree they are seen as very efficient and they can live on for a long time. A perfect case in genetics is sharks. They are very stable but they also don't evolve anymore. That works, but if you want to go past a certain point, it's a problem.

Q: That's what Bill Gates is.

A: That's a fairly good analogy but sharks is a bad word. I should make up another example. Turtles! Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. The Dodo too. Biodiversity is good and I think it is good in technology as well. If you look at a lot of stable things, you have a certain amount of biodiversity. Look at cars. The U.S. car industry was sloppy. There wasn't a lot of biodiversity. There no real competition from true diverse species. The Japanese came in and provided new diversity for the market. It was a huge boon for the car industry, though not so good for certain countries. Cars started improving.

Q: If you look at how Microsoft is now struggling to deal with Linux, what do you think?

A: They are not in trouble. I think they are struggling to deal with Linux partly because Linux is undermining them the same way they undercut their competition. If you look at DOS, or maybe compilers, one thing that happened with Microsoft was that these small upstarts came out and had cheaper compilers. DOS was also cheap and it undercut the competition. They never had a competitor like themselves. Then comes somebody who undercuts them and they start acting exactly how all of their competitors acted. If you look at how Unix vendors acted toward Microsoft, they were belittling Microsoft. They were saying yes we're more expensive but we're better and we give better support. Whether that was true or not was not the point. The reaction to somebody coming in and undercutting you is for Microsoft exactly the same as the failure mode for their competitors. Microsoft is on the receiving end of this undercutting.

Q: You have left Transmeta (the Santa Clara maker of low-power microprocessors) where you worked for six years. Now you've joined the Open Source Development Lab (which is creating a version of Linux for corporations). Can you explain why you took the leave of absence?

A: It's a number of reasons. One was for the last six months I was spending a lot of time working on the next 2.6 release of Linux. We're getting close. But I expect it to take a few more months at least. This happened before with other releases. I don't like doing releases but we have to do them. Before releases you get into a painful mode. Transmeta has been very good to me. This time I felt I'd have a hard time bouncing back to the Transmeta work. I was feeling more guilty about that. I talked to a lot of people there. They knew how I worked. The OSDL thing came along. I asked about that position when I decided I needed to leave. It was a neutral place. I need to concentrate on Linux. Why not let somebody pay me for that? I can't go to a Linux vendor like Red Hat because I would no longer be seen as neutral.

Q: With Transmeta, their plan didn't work out as expected. Did that affect your decision to leave them?

A: A lot of companies share that problem. I don't know. What made it easier to leave now was that it seems to have stabilized lately. We didn't have the panic problems we had. That made it easier and I didn't feel like I was a rat leaving a sinking ship. The fact that it didn't worked out affected a lot of my co-workers more than it did me. I ended up being able to cash in on my dream. It happened in a strange way. But I got my house in the area. In that sense it didn't affect me. Because the Transmeta dream didn't work out, it has less resources to do fundamental research. It has to concentrate on the customers and the products. For me, because I'm interested in the crazy stuff, that made Transmeta maybe not as fun as it was five or six years ago. Five or six years ago we did stuff at Transmeta that universities didn't do. We did fundamental research. That made Transmeta a very special place.

Q: You want to concentrate on going after one monopoly at a time?

A: (Laughs). I never saw Intel as a monopoly. It has competition. To me personally, Intel has always had a healthier position. A lot of people thought, yeah, he's always going after the big guys. That wasn't the point of being at Transmeta. I want to do something that is relevant, and if it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.

Q: Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?

A: That is a traditional company question. If you're a company, you want to go after certain markets. The point of open source is there is no such thing as certain markets you go after. It's more like certain companies use Linux to go after a market. The embedded space has been very receptive to Linux. It's not like Wind River doesn't exist, but Linux is growing.

Q: Did it surprise you that IBM, this big giant company, embraced Linux?

A: I always thought IBM was interesting. Early on in 1998 and 1999, a lot of people were going through the motions of embracing Linux. They would mention it in a press release. But IBM always followed through. Because I was never interested in the commercial market, I never found fault with how people used Linux there. I enjoyed that IBM started porting Linux to the S390, found that hugely amusing. I thought, OK, somebody has done a few too many drugs. But it ended up being a master stroke. The people who started it just did it because they found it interesting. It ended up working out really well.

Q: You mentioned you wanted to end up at a neutral space. Do you feel like a religious leader? Or what kind of leader do you see yourself as?

A: I try to avoid that. I think I've been fairly successful. Some of the free software people don't like how I'm not very religious. I try to be pragmatic. People know that. At the same time I have a very high profile and because people trust me and want to continue to trust me and I want people to trust me, I want to make sure that there is nothing that has the appearance of being bad. Going to work for a specific Linux company would, even if I work the way I've always worked, it would still look like I was favoring one vendor over another. You can't avoid it in the environment we're in.. I want to make sure everyone sees that I'm neutral. They may disagree with me and quite often they do. But at least they know I'm not working for the competition. I may not care about their viewpoint, but they know I do it for my own personal reasons. That makes people a lot more accepting. That makes it easier for me to make decisions. People will accept those decisions more if they understand they are my personal decisions and not because I am trying to screw them over as a competitor. It gives me more authority. That's the only authority I have. I don't have legal rights. I have one special right since I started Linux as the owner of the collective copyright. From a license standpoint I don't have any special rights.

Q: What about cashing in on Linux? Where do you stand on where it is appropriate for you to make money from Linux?

A: I'm cashing in in the sense that I have a good salary. I did get stock options and I accepted them when there were no strings attached. In the good old days there were a few Linux companies that gave me stock options as a thank-you. Nobody thought they would be worth that much when they gave them to me. I bought a house in this area so they were worth a lot. I'm doing OK. I'm not a Larry Ellison. There only needs to be one.

Q: You moved from Finland. How do you like living in Silicon Valley.

A: Some parts I love. I have a convertible. I will never ever move to a place where I can't drive a convertible. I like the dynamics. Sometimes it's sad how you go into a random restaurant and all the tables around you talk about technology. At the same time, it is nice to be where you understand the people. Genetically maybe not very homogenous. But perspective wise, it's a nice place to be. It's too crowded. It's too expensive.

Q: And what about the bust?

A: Everybody was expecting it. Everybody was calling it a bubble. The people who now complain about it. They didn't complain two years ago. What I think is sad is the people who came here two years ago, just as the bust was starting, had jobs for not very long, got laid off, and had to move back. They changed their lives. That's nasty. I remember it took me four years to get a green card. The people who came in at the wrong time, they had to go back. The social issues there are huge.

Q: Any irony that you might be deposed by (SCO counsel) David Boies, who led the case against Microsoft?

A: I was a bit surprised. I realize that David Boies wasn't against Microsoft. It's that he likes high-profile cases against big companies. That's what he specializes in. In that sense, SCO vs IBM makes sense. It's a nice twist but it doesn't mean anything.

BBC NEWS Technology/Mr Linux basks in the limelight, Saturday, 5 October, 2002

The culture around Linux has become big business.

Linus Torvalds has revealed he is happy to be the poster boy for the anti-Microsoft campaign but would not know what to say if he met Bill Gates. If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over the end result is bad
 

Linus Torvalds

Talking to BBC World ClickOnline at his home in Silicon Valley, the inventor of the Linux operating system admitted that he has never been in the same room with his arch-rival.

"We have been at the same conferences but never in the same room. I wouldn't know what to say to him," he told ClickOnline.

Mr Torvalds enjoys the notoriety he has achieved as the man that challenged the Microsoft empire with his open source alternative operating system.

Rising to the challenge

"In a way it is fun. I'm pleased to be a poster boy. It gives me some self-importance," he said.

He would not, however, want to become personally involved in the dispute with Microsoft.

"I've tried to stay out of the Microsoft debate. If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over the end result is bad," he said.

People may hate Windows but they run it despite that because, quite frankly, they don't care about computers

Linus Torvalds

The main reason he developed Linux in the first place had as much to do with wanting a challenge as being fed up with an operating system that would not do what he wanted it to.

Like most technology projects it ran way over the time allotted to it and, to this day, is not truly finished.

"It was a lot harder than I expected. I thought, like most of my projects, it would talk half a year and then I'd lose interest," he said.

To the relief of his legion of followers he did persevere and eleven years on is still working on it.

Reluctance to change

While Linux is gradually gaining ground on Microsoft it might well not be suitable for everyone, Mr Torvalds admitted.

"Most people don't want to change. They may hate Windows but they run it despite that because, quite frankly, they don't care about computers," he said.

Linux facts

Worth about $280m by 2006 Cheaper than Microsoft software Source code is open for others to look and change IBM is one of its biggest fans

And even those that do care, often install Linux without much idea of what they want it to do, he said.

Mr Torvalds is not convinced that the open source movement, which has radically altered both the operating system landscape and the mindset of Microsoft itself, will ever entirely topple the Gates empire.

"I think, in the end, Linux will be a big part of why it happens but Microsoft is not going to shrink into nothingness in the foreseeable future," he said.

Instead it is more likely that Microsoft will become like IBM - "still huge but not the dominant force anymore", he said.

The world of coding is beginning to lose importance as Mr Torvalds, ubergeek, admits he has finally found a balance between work and play.

Uber-geek grows up

I'm somewhere between geek and normal,

Linus Torvalds

"I have a life too. I have kids now. Linux has been a big part of my life but now I want to have my own time," he told ClickOnline.

He revealed that he is more likely to have childrens' parties with bouncy castle and candyfloss than to have a bunch of programmers round.

"Part of doing Linux was that I had to communicate a lot more instead of just being a geek in front of a computer.

"It has made me more used to talking to people. I still like coding but I have other things to do," he said.

Although his followers would dispute it, Mr Torvalds is not convinced the phenomenon of Linux has made him entirely cool.

"No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal," he said.

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