Just for Fun is a book by Linus Torvalds written in 2002 – about 10 years after the project started and when Linux was starting to become popular. I purchased the book years ago and re-read it recently.
It contains some interesting points:
Probably the greatest example of this is not from computing but from mathematics. The story goes that the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was in school and his teacher was bored, so to keep the students preoccupied he instructed them to add up all the numbers between 1 and 100. The teacher expected the young people to take all day doing that. But the budding mathematician came back five minutes later with the correct answer: 5,050. The solution is not to actually add up all the numbers, because that would be frustrating and stupid. What he discovered was that by adding 1 and 100 you get 101. Then by adding 2 and 99 you get 101. Then 3 and 98 is 101. So 50 and 51 is 101. In a matter of seconds he noticed that it’s 50 pairs of 101, so the answer is 5,050.
Regardless, I didn’t want to sell Linux. And I didn’t want to lose control, which meant I didn’t want anybody else to sell it, either. I made that clear in the copyright policy I included in the copying file of the first version I had uploaded back in September. Thanks to the Berne Convention in Europe in the 1800s, you own the copyright to anything you create, unless you sell the copyright. As the copyright owner, I got to make up the rules: You can use the operating system for free, as long as you don’t sell it, and if you make any changes or improvements you must make them available to everybody in source code (as opposed to binaries, which are inaccessible). If you didn’t agree with these rules, you didn’t have the right to copy the code or do anything with it.
And there are nagging fears that companies in places like China won’t honor the GPL. Practically nothing in their legal system prevents them from breaking the copyright, and in a real sense it’s not worth the trouble to go after people who would try to do something illegal. That’s what big software companies and the music industry have tried to do and it hasn’t been overwhelmingly successful. My fears are mitigated by reality. Somebody might do it for awhile, but it is the people who actually honor the copyright, who feed back their changes to the kernel and have it improved, who are going to have a leg up. They’ll be part of the process of upgrading the kernel. By contrast, people who don’t honor the GPL will not be able to take advantage of the upgrades, and their customers will leave them. I hope.
Microkernels
The theory behind the microkernel is that operating systems are complicated. So you try to get some of the complexity out by modularizing it a lot. The tenet of the microkernel approach is that the kernel, which is the core of the core of the core, should do as little as possible. Its main function is to communicate. All the differ- ent things that the computer offers are services that are available through the microkernel communications channels. In the micro- kernel approach, you’re supposed to split up the problem space so much that none of it is complex.
I thought this was stupid. Yes, it makes every single piece simple. But the interactions make it far more complex than it would be if many of the services were included in the kernel itself, as they are in Linux. Think of your brain. Every single piece is simple, but the interactions between the pieces make for a highly complex system. It’s the whole-is-bigger-than-the-parts problem. If you take a problem and split it in half and say that the halves are half as complicated, you’re ignoring the fact that you have to add in the complication of communication between the two halves. The theory behind the microkernel was that you split the kernel into fifty independent parts, and each of the parts is a fiftieth of the complexity. But then everybody ignores the fact that the communication among the parts is actually more complicated than the original system was – never mind the fact that the parts are still not trivial.
That’s the biggest argument against microkernels. The simplicity you try to reach is a false simplicity.
Once they got their fill of the Amoeba-that-Destroyed-Microsoft plot (note: in the interest of full disclosure, this sentence has been spell-checked by a Microsoft product), journalists wanted to understand the concept of open source. That message was taking less and less time to get across, since people could now see examples of it in action. What seemed to amaze them next was the administration of Linux. They couldn’t grasp how the largest collaborative project in the history of humanity could possibly be managed so effectively when the average thirty-person company typically degenerates into something resembling barnyard chaos.
Benevolent dictator? No, I’m just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That’s when you get the best results.
What makes the discussion ugly at this point is that a lot of the arguments for stronger intellectual property rights are based on the notion of giving inventors and artists more “protection.” What people don’t seem to ever realize is that giving such powerful rights to some people also ends up taking rights away from others.
To a large degree, finding peace in this intellectual property war is what open source is all about. While a lot of people have their own opinions about what open source really tries to do, in many ways you can see it as a high-tech détente, a defusing of copyright as a weapon in this fight of intellectual property.
Success is about quality and about giving folks what they want. It’s not about trying to control people.
If you try to make money by controlling a resource, you’ll eventually find yourself out of business. This is a form of despotism, and history overflows with examples of its ill effects.
The first time people hear about the open-source approach, it sounds ludicrous. That’s why it has taken years for the message of its virtues to sink in. Ideology isn’t what has sold the open-source model. It started gaining attention when it was obvious that open source was the best method of developing and improving the highest quality technology. And now it is winning in the marketplace, an accomplishment has brought open source its greatest acceptance. Companies were able to be created around numerous value-added services, or to use open source as a way of making a technology popular. When the money rolls in, people get convinced.
One of the least understood pieces of the open source puzzle is how so many good programmers would deign to work for absolutely no money. A word about motivation is in order. In a society where survival is more or less assured, money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers. The open source model gives people the opportunity to live their passion. To have fun. And to work with the world’s best programmers, not the few who happen to be employed by their company. Open-source developers strive to earn the esteem of their peers. That’s got to be highly motivating.
And just as science wasn’t born out of an effort to undermine the religious establishment, open source wasn’t conceived in order to detonate the software establishment. It is there to produce the best technology, and to see where it goes. Science on its own does not make money. It has been the secondary effects of science that create all the wealth. The same goes for open source. It allows the creation of secondary industries that challenge established businesses …
Like science itself, open source’s secondary effects are endless. It is creating things that until recently were considered impossible, and opening up unexpected new markets. With Linux, as with other open-source projects, companies can make their own versions and their own changes, which really isn’t possible any other way. It’s exciting to realize that just about everything that’s ever been done with Linux was not remotely on the radar when we started
It’s like letting the universe take care of itself. By not controlling the technology, you are `not limiting its uses. You make it available and people make local decisions to use it as a launching pad for their own products and services. And while most of those decisions don’t make sense in the larger scale of things, they actu- ally work really well. This is not about trying to spread Linux. It’s about making Linux available and then letting it spread itself. And this doesn’t apply only to Linux. It applies to any project that’s open.
Open source makes sense.
People don’t quibble with the need for free speech. It is a liberty that people have defended with their lives. Freedom is always something you have to defend with your life. But it’s also not an easy choice to make initially. And the same is true of openness. You just have to make the decision to be open. It’s a difficult stance to take at first, but it actually creates more stability in the end.
When folks first hear about the possibility of opening up an existing commercial project, they tend to ask the same questions. One question has to do with how people inside the company would feel about the possibility of having an outsider produce work that is better than their own and having that so publicly noticeable. I think they should feel great about it, and great that they are get- ting paid for not even doing most of the work. In that regard, open source or open anything, for that matter is unforgiving. It shows who can get the job done, who is better. You can’t hide behind managers.
- Open source is the best way of leveraging outside talent. But you still need to have somebody inside the company who keeps track of the company’s needs. That person may not even be the project’s leader. In fact, it could be a benefit to the company if someone on the outside takes it over and is doing it for free.
Okay. You’re right, I should stop preaching. Open source is not for everyone or every project or every corporation. But the more that people start taking stock of the success of Linux, the more they realize this isn’t the knee-jerk rantings of idealistic, unwashed high-schoolers.