Leader
Of The Free World
By Gary Rivlin
Wired
Magazine
24 November, 2003
Linus
Torvalds wants me to believe he's too boring for this story. The creator
of the Linux operating system portrays himself as a mild-mannered soul
leading a humdrum life, just another guy lucky enough to own a McMansion
in the hills above San Jose courtesy of the money-mad late '90s. Before
agreeing to meet me, Torvalds sent an email imagining that I'd be overwhelmed
by the tedium of hanging around with the likes of him.
"Six shots
of coffee and I was expecting Linus to really spring into action,"
he wrote, pretending to be me. "Where would he go next? Fighting
evil software hoarders? But no. He got into his car (dammit, if I had
a car like that I wouldn't act so sluglike) and drove sedately back
home I closed my eyes and dreamt of more exciting assignments."
On one level, Torvalds'
life really is filled with quotidian routine. He works from home as
a fellow for the Open Source Development Lab, a corporate-funded consortium
created to foster improvements to Linux. His commute is a walk down
a flight of stairs to an office he shares with Tove, his wife of nine
years. It's jammed with Linux-related books, few of which he's read,
and looks out onto the narrow walkway between his home and the neighbor's.
The early July day he invites me to visit is his first official one
as an OSDL employee, but it isn't long after my arrival that he excuses
himself to take out the garbage because Tove nags him about the smell.
Later, he takes a break to feed a lunch of milk splashed over Cheerios
to his three daughters, all younger than 8, while Tove runs errands.
Torvalds, 33, looks
like a supply clerk. His wispy brown hair frames preternaturally blue
eyes and a soft, open face with an ample nose and heavy jaw. He's almost
never without a benign grin, a smile so pearly-white perfect that he
could get work in a teeth-bleaching ad. And he's dressed as though ready
for a casual morning of tennis: white socks, white shorts, and a slight
variation of the same shirt he more or less always wears - a white polo
obtained for free at some Linux event.
Yet Torvalds' humble
office is the de facto world headquarters for an operating system now
used by more than 18 million people around the globe, and this self-described
ordinary Joe is admired by legions of fans who cast him as a modern-day
warrior courageous enough to challenge the most powerful technology
companies in the universe and smart enough to win. It's easy to see
why that hyperbolic depiction has taken hold. At 21, wearing a ratty
robe in a darkened room in his mother's Helsinki apartment, Torvalds
wrote the kernel of an operating system that can now be found inside
a boggling array of machines and devices. He posted it on the Internet
and invited other programmers to improve it. Since then, tens of thousands
of them have, making Linux perhaps the single largest collaborative
project in the planet's history. Twelve years on, the operating system
is robust enough to run the world's most powerful supercomputers yet
sleek and versatile enough to run inside consumer toys like TiVo, as
well as television set-top boxes and portable devices such as cell phones
and handhelds. But even more impressive than Linux's increasing prevalence
in living rooms and pockets is its growth in the market for servers,
the centralized computers that power the Internet and corporate networks.
It's only a matter of time, concluded Goldman Sachs in a study released
earlier this year titled "Fear the Penguin," before Linux
displaces Unix as the dominant operating system running the world's
largest corporate data centers. It's impossible to measure precisely
the spread of software that anyone - from a resident of a third world
country to the CTO of a multinational giant - can download for free
over the Internet, but Linux has surely proved itself the most revolutionary
software undertaking of the past decade.
Linux's mainstream
arrival is testament not only to the worth of the code contributed by
programmers working out of love rather than pursuit of a paycheck, but
to the power of its progenitor, who still gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down
to any changes. Torvalds acknowledges being "benevolent dictator
of Planet Linux," as he calls it, yet the secret to his success
is not, apparently, his technological prowess but his disarming personality.
Check in with the loyal subjects who have watched Torvalds' rule - a
process best accomplished via email - and they'll agree. As Cliff Miller,
an early Linux contributor, writes: "He is a great leader, which
he may not even realize."
Over the past decade,
other free software products have been hailed as critical building blocks
of our networked world. About two-thirds of the servers that collectively
make up the Internet deliver Web pages and other data through a program
called Apache, developed by a band of programmers who receive no direct
financial compensation for their work. The programming language Perl,
another freebie, has become so indispensable to Web developers that
it's been referred to as the duct tape of the Internet. And most of
the world's email is routed through Sendmail, yet another exercise in
mob authorship. Like Linux, each of these was created by coders abiding
by the open source credo: Do what you wish to improve a product, charge
for it if you like, but share the underlying source code you added.
These efforts, impressive
as they are, haven't matched Linux in terms of reach and acclaim. That's
partly because, as an operating system, Linux plays the glamour position
in the software world, akin to the quarterback or lead guitar. But hackers
have backed other free operating systems, and none have attained the
following that Linux enjoys. "This is not due to the variation
in technical merit, development style, or licensing scheme," Miller
writes to me. "The difference is spelled L-I-N-U-S." People
have tried to make Torvalds into what he's not - anti-money, anti-capitalist,
anti-Microsoft - so they tend to miss his true strengths. Those who
work closely with Torvalds describe him as a steadying force atop an
ever burgeoning community populated by more than its share of prickly
programmers and zealots. Under his guidance, they manage to crank out
software that matches, if not exceeds, the work produced by the salaried
armies of Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and other well-financed behemoths.
Those giants have
certainly taken notice. Microsoft's top executives acknowledge Linux
as a top adversary, and it's no wonder. Time has shown a strong correlation
between a company's stock price and the vigor with which that company
has embraced Linux. Oracle, IBM, and Intel - three of the system's earliest
corporate proponents - have mostly held their value on Wall Street over
the past couple years. Sun, which was late and halfhearted in adopting
Linux, has watched its stock plummet.
Still, for all its
recent triumphs, Linux now faces its single greatest threat: a lawsuit
that seeks to prove that Linux represents a widespread case of intellectual
property theft and to charge its users steep fees as compensation. In
March, the SCO Group, a Utah-based company that owns the rights to the
Unix operating system, accused IBM of dropping thousands of lines of
Unix into Linux. Since then, SCO executives have charged that the presence
of its code in Linux raises ownership issues that call into question
not only Linux's legality but the very process that makes open source
such a vital part of the tech world. Linux is based on donated code:
Torvalds and his peers who oversee popular open source projects accept
contributions from any and all sources based on the merits of the code
alone. They don't have the institutional resources to ensure that a
programmer isn't guilty of plagiarism.
"We need to
step back and take a look at the open source business model, which doesn't
provide [private enterprises like ours] with inherent protections,"
SCO chief executive Darl McBride charged in August. To pursue its claim
against IBM, whose programmers have been some of the most prolific contributors
to Linux, SCO has hired David Boies, who represented the government
against Microsoft and Gore against Bush before the US Supreme Court.
Legal papers filed
by SCO cast Torvalds as a ringleader encouraging his followers to brazenly
flout the law, and though the suit wouldn't have a significant financial
impact on him (he collects no royalties from his operating system),
Linux has come to define his identity. Torvalds never set out to champion
an alternative method for creating software, but inadvertently he has,
and now he's both proud of that accomplishment and angry that his life's
work is under attack. For better or for worse, he has emerged as the
poster boy for the open source movement, and SCO has thrown a big fat
dirtball at the cause. "I spend a lot more time than any person
should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual
property issues," Torvalds says with a sigh.
Torvalds is a work-at-home
dad with no formal management training. He confesses to being terribly
disorganized. His approach to voicemail is to let messages stack up
and then delete them without listening to any. His memory is so lousy
that he can't recall whether he was 6 or 8 or 10 when his parents divorced.
And he's awfully absentminded: We are heading out the door for lunch
when Torvalds suddenly remembers that his wife is out and that if we
leave, his kids will be home alone. Then there's his ambivalence about
his role as Linux's leader. "I don't have a five-year agricultural
plan," he says. "I don't want to dictate: This is how we're
all going to march in lockstep." Yet the 12 years he's presided
over an unruly group of volunteer programmers is worthy of study by
those who teach leadership inside the world's finest MBA programs.
His hold over Linux
is based more on loyalty than legalities. He owns the rights to the
name and nothing else. Theoretically, someone could appropriate every
last line of his OS and rename it Sally. "I can't afford to make
too many stupid mistakes," Torvalds says, "because then people
watching will say, hey, maybe we can find someone better. I don't have
any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm
doing." He jokingly refers to himself as "Linux's hood ornament,"
and he's anything but an autocrat. His power is based on nothing more
than the collective respect of his cohorts.
Almost from the
beginning, Torvalds has surrounded himself with a circle of deputies
he calls "maintainers." These are programmers whose contributions
have impressed him in a particular category - networking, say, or file
system management - so that now they contribute code as well as screen
the contributions of others that fall into their area of expertise.
"Nobody gets declared into any of these positions," explains
Alan Cox, who until this summer was responsible for those layers of
the operating system that communicate with disk drives. Instead, Torvalds
will simply start relying on that person to help him weigh the merits
of others' work; suddenly the programmer finds himself occupying an
exalted role. Today, Torvalds has a dozen maintainers who help him manage
upcoming versions of Linux. According to Cox, Torvalds tends to have
a different relationship with each one. Some he's collaborated with
for many years and trusts implicitly. Others he reviews more closely
because "perhaps he doesn't trust their design decisions or some
of their coding," writes Cox in an email. "We all have our
weaknesses." That's one of the great advantages of the open source
model, Cox adds: constant feedback and peer review.
This geographically
dispersed group meets at least once a year to talk about its goals for
the operating system. "Linus sets a philosophical direction about
how he likes the code to be," says Andrew Morton, who has been
working on core components of Linux since 2000. "The rest of us
pretty much follow his lead." Torvalds has final say over their
decisions, but it's extremely rare for him to overrule any of them.
Earlier this year,
Torvalds asked Morton to take over informally as number two. Morton,
who for several years ran software development teams inside Nortel Networks,
is now overseeing the release of Linux version 2.6, expected by the
end of this year. But that arrangement is represented more clearly on
an organizational chart than in reality. Some people, it seems, still
send potential 2.6 fixes directly to Torvalds - and he'll respond rather
than defer to his lieutenant. "Somehow things move ahead fairly
well," says Morton.
By all accounts,
Torvalds has a good feel for when he should hold forth and when he should
keep his opinion to himself. He'll debate an issue passionately - favoring
terms like pinhead and brain-damaged when arguing technical points -
and sometimes make the wrong call, but if so, he's proved willing to
publicly admit his mistakes. More than anything he seeks to avoid taking
sides in a way that might splinter his followers. "I'd much rather
have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into
two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other,"
he says. Often, when things are on the verge of getting messy, he'll
consciously avoid making a decision, allowing time for feelings to dissipate.
"Eventually, some obvious solution will come to the fore or the
issue will just fade away," says Morton.
In a way, Torvalds
is less a ruler (or a hood ornament, for that matter) than an ambassador,
roaming his virtual world and exerting his influence to prevent technical
fights from devolving into sectarian battles. Take the factions that
want him to make toppling Microsoft a priority: Create a version of
Linux as simple for novices to use as Windows, they reason, and you
loosen Redmond's grip on the PC. "That's the kind of politics you
see inside Oracle and Sun," Torvalds says. "Once you start
thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best
product, you're screwed."
Mike Olson is the
CEO of a Massachusetts-based database startup called Sleepycat Software
and contributed critical components to Linux as a UC Berkeley grad student.
He describes Torvalds as "very, very good - much better than engineers
in general - at smoothing out difficulties, building consensus, and
building community. He really has only a technical agenda."
Perhaps there's
no plainer example of Torvalds' equanimity than his unflappable attitude
toward Richard Stallman, the intellectual forefather of the free software
movement. A former computer scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Lab, Stallman has been arguing as far back as 1984 that proprietary
software is practically a crime against humanity. That's the year he
launched a project called GNU with the aim of creating a free operating
system that would displace Unix. (GNU is a recursive name that stands
for GNU's Not Unix.) He obstinately rejects the term open source despite
its now near universal use, preferring free software, the name he coined.
And although Torvalds released the kernel of his operating system well
before GNU produced a reliable one of its own, Stallman insists Torvalds'
work should properly be called GNU/Linux, because early contributors
adapted GNU components for Linux - never mind that the Linux core is
non-GNU and now approaches 6 million lines of code. (Stallman declined
to be interviewed unless this article used his nomenclature throughout.)
Torvalds diplomatically declines to say anything about GNU and Stallman:
"That's not a debate I want to get involved in."
That's typical Torvalds,
according to John "maddog" Hall, who heads a nonprofit advocacy
group called Linux International and has been friends with Torvalds
since they met at a computer conference in 1994. Hall claims he's seen
an angry outburst only once, when a stranger was pestering Torvalds
about a technical point while he was drinking a beer with friends. "This
is different from some of the other free and open source advocates and
project leaders whose anger is legendary," Hall writes in an email.
Torvalds has a good
human touch. Hall, who has no children, says he will be forever grateful
to his friend for choosing him as godfather to two of Torvalds' daughters.Yet
when it comes to weighing the merits of a technology, Torvalds is adept
at separating the idea from the person suggesting it. His is a world
that works only if the best idea wins; he has no giant marketing budget
to compensate for poor technical decisions, no clout in the marketplace
to compensate for mediocrity. It's invariably painful when Torvalds
rejects someone's contribution. The friends of one programmer told Torvalds
their pal had threatened suicide after a feature he had obviously spent
a lot of time developing was not included.
"Torvalds makes
decisions based on whether he feels a design is clean, of high quality,
whether it's going to be easy to service and, very important, whether
it's needed by a broad set of users," says Dan Frye, who as director
of IBM's Linux technology center oversees a team of more than 300 developers.
"He's very good at staying away from anything just to satisfy a
single corporate user or any entity's agenda."
"If you're
too commercial," Torvalds says, "you end up being too shortsighted.
You have a 'this is what we need' mentality, and you blow everything
else off. But you want the commercial side, because commercial forces
end up listening to different customers and meeting different needs
compared to those doing it just for fun."
"I was an ugly
child." That's how Torvalds chose to open his 2001 autobiography,
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, written with
journalist David Diamond. He describes himself as "a beaverish
runt" of a kid and goes out of his way to stress his flaws, as
if unaware that the standard practice of the genre is to make oneself
sound more grand and important.
Perhaps he inherited
his penchant for self-deprecation from his mother. Mikke Torvalds, a
journalist with the Finnish News Agency, chose "Linus, schminus"
as her subject line in the first email she sent to me. "As Sara
[his sister] and I used to say, just give Linus a spare closet with
a good computer in it and feed him some dry pasta, and he'll be perfectly
happy," Mikke wrote.
In a way, Linus
was born to be a revolutionary. His parents were campus radicals at
the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. Torvalds' father was a card-carrying
Communist who spent a year studying in Moscow when his son was about
5. He served a stint as a minor elected official (he's now a prominent
television and radio exec). Other kids teased Linus about his father's
politics. "Growing up, I was terribly embarrassed by him,"
Torvalds says.
Reading through his
autobiography, anyone might think that his first true love was not a girl
but the British-produced Sinclair QL, a then state-of-the-art machine
he bought while a computer science student at the University of Helsinki.
The QL, one of the world's first 32-bit boxes, provided Torvalds with
his motivation for writing Linux: He wanted an OS for his home computer
that would be as stable and strong as Unix, which he used on campus. At
first he turned to a knockoff called Minix, but in time found it frustratingly
inadequate as well. Since higher education is free in Finland and there
isn't the pressure to finish a degree in four years, Torvalds decided
to take a break and turn his attention full-time to creating his own operating
system.
Through the spring
and summer of 1991, Torvalds worked on the kernel of the system. He
lived in near-isolation, rarely bothering to open the thick black curtains
he had hung over his windows to reduce glare. He would have been a total
recluse, he recalls, if not for Wednesday-night gatherings at a local
pub, where he'd drink beer and talk shop with fellow members of the
university's computer club. Finally, on September 17, 1991, he posted
a message in a Minix users newsgroup, announcing that a rough cut of
his creation could be downloaded for free from a university Internet
site. Use Linux if you'd like, he instructed people, but any changes,
new features, or improvements you devise must be shared with everyone
else at no cost. It's an idea he borrowed from Richard Stallman, who
had devised the General Public License, an agreement by which entrepreneurs
could charge as much as they liked for a program but had to provide
access to its source code. Torvalds opted for a version of the GPL that
forbade anyone from making money selling modified versions of Linux.
He bristles when
I suggest it can't be coincidence that a man born to socialist firebrands
created something many people regard as revolutionary because it's shared
gratis with the masses. "It never was, Take this and let us together
build a better world," he says. His choices were to either keep
this unfinished core of an OS for himself or share it with anyone who
wanted it.
"My reasons
for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish," he says. "I
didn't want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating
system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help." Besides, he
couldn't fathom collecting money for something he viewed as unfinished
work that required the contribution of others.
A few months after
he unveiled Linux, Torvalds received an email asking if he would add
a compression feature so that Linux would work on systems with limited
memory. It was nothing Torvalds would ever use - his system had ample
RAM - but he worked on the feature throughout Christmas eve and into
Christmas day.
The feature proved
to be the add-on that gave his creation a leg up on Minix and other
Unix knockoffs. Almost immediately after Torvalds posted the improvement,
Linux gained hundreds of users, and he began receiving messages from
people offering bug fixes and new features that made the OS increasingly
valuable. This early sign of success gave him the confidence to change
the licensing agreement so that people could make money selling Linux-based
products as long as they continued to share the source code on any features
they devised. The move led to the creation of companies such as Red
Hat, founded in 1993, adding the energy and drive of entrepreneurs to
the mix of those contributing to Linux.
These kinds of strategic
decisions proved as key to Linux's success as the technical choices
Torvalds made. One complaint about Linux at the time was that it worked
only on PCs, so in 1994 Torvalds began seeking new outlets for his operating
system, starting with a workstation computer called the Alpha, made
by Digital Equipment Corp. Serendipity also played a role in the spread
of Linux. Torvalds had nothing to do with the creation of the server
software package Apache, but its developers wrote it first for the Linux
platform, which gave the operating system entrée into corporations
in the mid-1990s. By 1997, tech analysts were conservatively estimating
that at least 3 million computers worldwide were running Linux.
With renown came
unexpected demands. Torvalds' private life became fodder for discussion
and debate. He met Tove, a six-time Finnish karate champ, while teaching
an introductory computer course at the University of Helsinki. (She
responded to his first homework assignment - each student was to send
him an email - by asking him out on a date.) When word spread that the
couple was going to have a child, the open source community greeted
the news with fear rather than joy. Could Torvalds balance Linux and
family, members of newsgroups wondered in emails, especially given the
demands of grad school?
The reaction was
even more intense when, in 1997, he announced that he was taking a job
with Transmeta, a chipmaker in Santa Clara, California. Linux fans feared
he'd never be able to remain true to his open source roots in a commercial
atmosphere. Worse, the venture was funded in part by Microsoft cofounder
Paul Allen, which fueled sarcastic references to the "evil corporate
environment" he was entering. For Torvalds, though, the decision
was fairly straightforward. He'd always hated the cold, dark winters
in Finland, and this was an opportunity to live in sunny Silicon Valley,
the center of the universe to anyone in the computer field. He had been
offered jobs at Linux-based businesses like Red Hat, but he was loath
to favor one vendor over another. His arrangement with Transmeta, where
he wrote software that allowed operating systems to communicate with
the company's chips, permitted him to also spend time on Linux. In return,
Transmeta would receive the services of a talented engineer who brought
with him invaluable media attention - employment as a publicity stunt.
Torvalds arrived in
Silicon Valley at a time when the computer world was looking for a new
David to go up against Goliath. Microsoft seemed to have its hand in every
aspect of computing, and once Netscape lost the browser wars with Microsoft,
those committed to the cause glommed on to Linux as the next big threat
to the Redmond beast. Like Windows, Linux ran on Intel-based PCs, but
Windows was crash-prone even on a single machine, whereas Linux could
reliably lash together dozens of computers. That gave it an advantage
with corporate customers.
Journalists had
a field day contrasting Torvalds - seemingly so indifferent to wealth
that he didn't charge a penny for his product - with Gates, filthy rich
with all that monopoly money. Fan sites popped up in dozens of languages.
"The easy story line was that I was an idealist, even though that
isn't the motivation for Linux," Torvalds says. He didn't exactly
help put the kibosh on that narrative when he turned down the $10 million
in options that a Linux-related company offered him to sit on its board
of directors. He thought he'd compromise his objectivity if he lent
his authority to any single company. His reasoning was sound, but was
it any wonder the press depicted Torvalds as an otherworldly creature
walking the Valley, where lucrative board appointments and IPO shares
were treated as an entitlement?
Torvalds' home is
spacious - a split-level, five-bedroom spread with a three-car garage
and a backyard Jacuzzi housed in a wooden gazebo. The master bedroom
affords enviable views of the hills and is so large that it contains
both an exercise bike and a treadmill (neither of which, Torvalds confesses,
he ever uses). Another room upstairs, outfitted with a pool table, wet
bar, and temperature-controlled mini wine cellar, serves as his playpen.
The home teems with the Linux mascot, from porcelain penguins in various
sizes to partying penguins on a blue hand towel in the guest bathroom.
But his favorite toy is a sunburst-yellow Mercedes SLK32 sitting in
the garage. Still, it's the rear end of the black Acura SUV next to
it that draws my attention. The faithful can be seen up and down Highway
101 in Northern California, driving their 7-year-old Hondas and used
Volvos outfitted with bumper stickers that proclaim them Linux rebels.
But the gleaming silver license plate frame affixed to Tove's car reads:
coffee, chocolate, men: some things are better rich.
Torvalds was hardly
wealthy his first few years in the Valley. Dotcom kids were getting
rich on inventions barely worth mentioning in the same breath as Linux,
yet he was living modestly on his Transmeta salary, his growing family
cramped in a duplex. People would send him emails pleading for a handout,
assuming he was as flush as he was famous. A man he never met even asked
him to deliver the eulogy at his father's funeral. Steve Jobs and Bill
Joy were among the tech bigwigs who contacted him out of the blue. He
was idolized by fans and at the same time burdened by the practical
worries of any Valley-based programmer struggling to make ends meet.
His mother recalls him fretting about the eventual cost of college tuition
for his children.
His fortunes changed
in 1999. Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading purveyors of Linux-based
software packages tailored for large enterprises, had granted him stock
options with no strings attached, thank-yous from entrepreneurs who
hoped to grow rich off his creation. When Red Hat went public that year,
Torvalds was suddenly worth $1 million. On the day VA Linux (now VA
Software) went public, Torvalds was worth roughly $20 million, though
by the time he could sell his shares, they were valued at only a fraction
of that.
Torvalds hesitated
before buying himself his first expensive bauble, a two-seater BMW convertible.
"I was a bit nervous about people's reaction," he confesses.
"Are they going to think I've gone over to the dark side?"
In the end he decided that the shape and price of the hunk of metal
he drove to and from work each day was his own business. Despite counsel
to the contrary, Torvalds wisely sold all of his stock and spent almost
all of the windfall on his home and his cars, trusting that he'd always
be able to earn a good salary as an engineer.
For the moment,
Torvalds has the security of his post at the Open Source Development
Lab, an organization whose scope and ranks have expanded along with
Linux. Created in 2000 by a small consortium of major technology companies,
including Intel and Hewlett-Packard, the OSDL aimed to accelerate Linux's
adoption by financing well-equipped labs where programmers could test
software features built specifically for the corporate world. Today,
the organization has more than two dozen employees working in labs in
Beaverton, Oregon, and in Yokohama, Japan, and 23 sponsoring companies
- some of which contribute as much as $1 million a year.
"We seek to
be the center of gravity for Linux development," says Stuart Cohen,
who took over as CEO of the lab in April. Working groups staffed by
employees of member corporations meet regularly to devise wish lists
meant to tailor Linux for use in new areas, such as global telecom networks
and high-end servers running the most demanding software applications.
For Torvalds, a
well-paying gig as the lab's first full-time research fellow seemed
like a dream come true. He'd be able to do what he's always done, but
without the Transmeta-related obligations that were vying for his time.
Instead, he started the job just as SCO's McBride declared that pretty
much anyone using Linux is violating copyright laws and ripping off
SCO. "With the US legal system, it's always hard to tell what the
hell is going to happen," Torvalds says. "So I can't just
dismiss the lawsuit as the complete crapola I think it is."
Near the end of
our day together, Torvalds and I head out in his Mercedes to eat at
a nearby sushi place, followed by a visit to Starbucks. Behind the wheel,
Torvalds is manic and possessed, driving with such a lead foot that
even a brief ride leaves me woozy. "The man with the flashy car,"
says the Starbucks barista who greets Torvalds, "the man with the
secret wild alter ego." She brings him a tall double latte without
waiting for him to order.
Here we finally
talk about what Torvalds describes as the "unpleasantness"
surrounding the SCO suit. The smile that graced his face for hours is
gone. The man who only 30 minutes ago seemed incapable of a bad mood
sits slumped in his chair.
At first, the suit
seemed like a narrowly defined contract dispute. SCO, which specializes
in software systems for small and medium-size businesses, licenses Unix
to larger com- panies like IBM that sell proprietary versions. SCO claims
that IBM dumped Unix code into Linux, and that this contribution helped
Linux to grow from a home-brewed plaything into an OS reliable enough
for IBM to sell Linux-based systems to Fortune 500 companies. A trial
isn't scheduled to start until well into 2005.
In the meantime,
SCO is raising the stakes. In June, the company amended its suit to
include an August 2001 email in which Torvalds admits he abides by a
"don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to patent issues:
"I do not look up any patents on principle because (a) it's a horrible
waste of time and (b) I don't want to know," he wrote to fellow
Linux hackers. Though McBride has insisted he seeks "to work through
issues in such a way that we get justice without putting a hole in the
head of the penguin," SCO now appears intent on doing just that.
In August, McBride announced a pricing plan that his company seems to
have plucked straight from city traffic ticket enforcement: Any for-profit
entity using Linux must pay SCO a onetime fee of $699 per processor.
Failure to do so by October 15 means the price doubles to $1,399. McBride
drew an analogy to the music industry's recent decision to target individual
users illegally downloading copyrighted songs. "If we have to sue
end users to give us relief for our damages," McBride says, "we
will." The same month, IBM filed a countersuit, accusing SCO of
infringing on several IBM patents and breaching the Linux GPL.
Torvalds is unapologetic
about his "don't want to know" email. "As any patent
lawyer will tell you, no engineer should ever go looking for a patent."
For one thing, he argues, that's a job best left to lawyers; for another,
if a competitor can prove a person checked and went ahead anyway, then
that engineer would be liable for triple damages. As Torvalds sees it,
SCO quoted his email only to score points in the media and cast this
as a broader fight over intellectual property. He does, however, regret
a crack he made at the end of his email that a hit man would be the
easiest solution. "The fact is," he says of the SCO suit,
"I don't think in the end this is going to mean a whole lot."
Perhaps, but that
assessment is offered by a man who sees every moment spent thinking
about legal matters as time away from his fellow citizens of Planet
Linux. Torvalds had long ago drained his latte by the time he was fed
up talking about SCO. We head out to his car, and any lingering bad
feelings seem to fly away as he gets behind the wheel of the Mercedes.
The top is down, and the hot Silicon Valley sun glints off his forehead.
Dressed all in white, with his paunch pressing against his shirt, he
looks like a contented pasha seated on his throne. He is an unusual
king, but then, he and his loyal subjects are an equally unusual and
amazing lot.