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SHOW: Fresh Air

DATE: June 4, 2001

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Linus Torvalds likes to say that a big part of his appeal is that he isn't Bill Gates. Who is Torvalds? He created the operating system LINUX, an alternative to Windows. But unlike Windows, the program code for LINUX is made public and can be used for free. Torvalds is a hero of the open source movement, programmers who believe that the basic code of software should be free and available so that others can modify and improve it. Hewlett-Packard and IBM have started working with LINUX, making this free system a force even within the corporate marketplace. In fact, LINUX has become the fastest-growing operating system for network server computers. It's been much slower to catch on with individual desktop users, in part because many users find it too complicated.

Torvalds grew up in Finland and developed the first version of LINUX in the early '90s while he was a student at the University of Helsinki. He now lives in California and works for the mobile computing company Transmeta. He has a new memoir called "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary." Since LINUX is an operating system, I'll let Torvalds explain what an operating system is.

Mr. LINUS TORVALDS (LINUX Creator): The operating system is kind of an interfaced layer between the actual hardware and the actual applications that people use on a computer, so the operating system's only purpose in life is basically to be a resource manager. And it doesn't do anything on its own, it's just waiting for requests by the real applications to do something. And that makes it kind of hard to point to anything specific. When you see a computer, you never really see the operating system itself.

GROSS: When you wrote the first LINUX program, what were you trying to do or improve on? Why did you feel like you needed to write your own program?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I mean, one of the reasons for writing my own program was just because that was what I was doing. That was my hobby. That is still my hobby. It's not just my work. It's what I do. Programming is just very interesting to me. So I was always working on some project or other, and the things that made me choose projects was--I was basically trying to find something interesting to do, but also something that I would use myself, and give whatever project I was working on meaning that way. And LINUX really started out as just another of those projects I've had. I needed an operating system, or I felt I needed a better operating system, on my computer, and I started small, with certain specific things I wanted to do, and it just grew.

GROSS: And at what point did you decide to put it on the Internet and make it available to other people?

Mr. TORVALDS: I was at a university. I was doing a lot of reading of news groups. It felt like the natural thing to do. So it wasn't actually a big decision at any point to say, `OK, let's make this a better system by making it public and by getting other people involved.' It was more of a, `Hey, I've done this. I think it's cool and useful and I know there are other people out there who are interested in the similar kinds of things I am' and then it took me quite by surprise just how many other people like that there were, and how the whole process changed by making it available on the Internet.

GROSS: What kind of feedback did you get after you put your LINUX operating system on the Internet?

Mr. TORVALDS: Remember that all the people initially who were even looking at it were very technical people, so most of the early feedback was fairly technical. It was all very positive. I mean, people would say that, `Hey, this looks really interesting,' even when they couldn't actually get it to work on their machines. And that was one of the unexpected advantages of making it available on the Internet was just the feedback on what kinds of features people wanted. And suddenly the project turned into something much more than my personal project. Suddenly it turned into--it was still my project, but it was something that was--where other people had ideas for things I could do, and eventually other people started doing things on their own, and it really changed how the whole process happened.

GROSS: Linus Torvalds is my guest and he's the inventor and the developer of the operating system known as LINUX, and he has a new book out called "Just for Fun."

Now as you started to refine the LINUX operating system, you decided that instead of copyrighting it, you would go with what's called the open source approach, where something is available on the Internet for free to anyone who wants to to download. Why did you want to do it that way instead of copyrighting it and selling it?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, to clarify one issue, it is actually copyrighted, but it's a strange kind of copyright which says that we use copyright law to ensure that, yes, you can copy it freely, but when you copy and distribute it to other people, you have to give the same rights to those people, too. So we're actually--LINUX and a lot of projects like LINUX do use copyright law, but it's kind of like a judo trick where it uses copyright laws' own strength against copyright law itself.

GROSS: This is called a general public license?

Mr. TORVALDS: It's called a general public license, and the whole--the idea behind the license is that a lot of programs are very useful to a lot of people and you don't want to take away the rights of people to improve all those programs, so especially among programmers, this is a very interesting notion where you have the right to improve on these programs and distribute your improvements to other people. And it's fascinating. It results in this community of people who program for the fun of it. And it's surprisingly effective.

GROSS: So in other words, I could take your LINUX operating system and make my improvements to it and I could circulate my improvements on the Internet, but I couldn't sell it.

Mr. TORVALDS: Oh, no, you could even sell it.

GROSS: I could sell it?

Mr. TORVALDS: Oh, absolutely. So what you can do is you can go to any ftp site or Web site that has the LINUX sources online, you download all the sources, you make your own improvements to it and you sell it as your own version of UNIX, and that's perfectly legal and a lot of people are doing that. What the copyright license says is that when you distribute it--whether you distribute it freely on the Internet or selling is not an issue. When you distribute it, you have to give everybody else the same rights to that drive work. So now somebody else can take your improved version and improve on it further and sell the improved improved version. Which means that the whole process becomes one of everybody can see everybody else's work, and everybody can try to choose the best improvements and sell them or support them or do whatever they want with it.

GROSS: So have you tried to follow all the permutations of LINUX and tried to incorporate the best ones into your version of it?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I've actually taken a more passive approach, which is it's too time-consuming to try to follow every single change that's going on, and what actually works a lot better is to see which changes get a lot of people excited and which changes make people want to use particular versions. And that's kind of--the approach is somewhat similar to evolution in biology, that you let all these changes take place. It's kind of like mutations of the whole program, and the ones that work the best, the ones that are the fittest, those are the ones that tend to survive in later versions.

GROSS: You've decided to not make money from the act of selling your operating system. You've made a lot of money along the way and you've become, you know, very famous along the way, but you haven't made money selling the operating system. Did you ever feel bad--particularly maybe early on before you knew that money would be coming through other sources and that you would become so well-known, did you ever feel bad like you were missing your big opportunity to actually get some money?

Mr. TORVALDS: I didn't, and the thing is, I never really decided, `I don't want to sell this.' It was not a--some people make it sound, and you made it sound, like I did this for some higher ideals, that, `I don't want to get involved with this dirty business of selling my operating system.' That was not the point. What made me not sell it was that I was not interested in the selling process. And I was not interested in all the stuff you have to do around the selling process. You have to do all the support, you have to get marketing involved, all the things that I am so completely uninterested in. So at all points in time I felt that I was doing what I was interested in. It wasn't that I was some saint trying to improve the world. It was because I was a selfish bastard that just--I knew what I wanted to do.

And I was never worried about going hungry because that's one of the great things about programming. Not only is it a lot of fun, it's also a real job and you can actually make real money doing it. So I always felt like I can do my own projects for my own fun, I can do what I want, and I can support my family doing it. And it ended up that I could support my family even better than I ever expected, but I was never worried about not making enough to live on.

GROSS: Are there any uses of the program or attempts to sell the program that have bothered you?

Mr. TORVALDS: No. No. What's actually happened was there's been a lot of uses of the programs and sales of the programs in places that I never expected to. And rather than be bothered by the fact that people were using it in ways that I didn't intend to, it was very exciting to see how people took something like this and did things that I could not have imagined being done. And that's been one of the kind of fun parts of the process, seeing how it evolves to something much more than I initially ever expected to.

GROSS: My guest is Linus Torvalds, creator of the computer operating system LINUX. His new memoir is called "Just for Fun." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Linus Torvalds is my guest and he's the creator of the operating system known as LINUX. There's also a new book called "Linus Torvalds: Just for Fun."

Now the best-known operating system is Windows, and Windows is on lots of computers. Bill Gates has worked really hard to make sure that Windows is on lots of computers, and you know, Microsoft is really excellent at marketing and distributing. You're not interested in marketing and distributing, so how did LINUX catch on without a big company to distribute it and market it?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I think one of the reasons is that while I'm not interested in marketing and distribution, there are others who are, and the license allows those people who are interested in marketing and distribution to do so. And so that's part of the picture. The other part is that while Microsoft has been very effective in the marketplace, LINUX kind of changed the rules on how the marketplace works. Unlike a lot of other Microsoft foes, like IBM and Apple and Oracle, historically, they've tended to try to become the next Microsoft. And by trying to be and work in the same commercial space that Microsoft has worked, they've been very vulnerable to the kind of marketing tactics and very strong market share that Microsoft has.

And LINUX didn't do that. LINUX just became like hundreds and thousands of different projects all improving LINUX in their own ways for their own reasons, and there was no single company that was vulnerable to Microsoft marketing or Microsoft ad campaign. And that, I think, made it very hard for Microsoft or any of the other commercial competitors to kind of grapple with LINUX because it was this formless thing that was everywhere and yet nowhere. And I think that's one of the reasons why LINUX has been able to take over markets that actually have been hard for big commercial companies.

GROSS: Now recently some really big companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM have become involved in LINUX. I don't know exactly the nature of those arrangements and whether you've been in on it or not. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how some of the bigger companies are working with LINUX and where you fit in.

Mr. TORVALDS: See, I haven't been on it, and again, the reason I haven't been in on it is the same reason that I haven't been interested in marketing and other aspects. I care about the technology and that's what I do. And what happens is that a lot of companies actually like this. A lot of companies like the lack of politics, like the freedom, like the ability for companies to do their own thing with LINUX. And so you'll find companies like IBM, one of the biggest companies in computers ever, who had a lot of trouble with their own operating systems. Everybody has at least heard of OS/2 and nobody actually uses it. And suddenly big companies like this have the possibility to take something like LINUX and modify it for their needs without having to go to all the trouble they had to go to with OS/2 and fighting licensing issues with Microsoft. And that's a big relief to some of these companies.

GROSS: What is IBM doing with LINUX?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, IBM or any of these companies have all the same rights that anybody has.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. TORVALDS: They have the same rights that you have and, perhaps a bit surprisingly, they have the same rights that I have. That I don't have any special rights to LINUX really either. They have the right to do whatever they want. They have the right to make their modifications. They have the right to sell them on their computers, and that's actually what they do. That you can buy IBM computers ranging from laptops up to supercomputers running LINUX, and that's one of the advantages for IBM when it comes to LINUX is that LINUX is actually the first operating system that works across the whole range of hardware that IBM sells. We're talking about not just working on PCs, but they're working on the IBM C series and the IBM P series which are completely different beasts.

GROSS: Is there any way you could talk about what the difference is between LINUX and Windows that would help us understand what LINUX is a little bit more?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, there's a lot of differences. One may be--the most noticeable one to the user is that Windows is more than just an operating system. Windows is a way of life to some degree, and more specifically it's Microsoft's way of life, and you'd better like to live the way they tell you to live, or else. So Windows is a very `in your face' operating system and, in my opinion, has failures as an operating system exactly because of that. Microsoft has made a lot of decisions about what you're supposed to be able to do with the system. So when you see Windows, you see a lot of decisions made for you by Microsoft.

While LINUX is really just the kernel of the operating system and you can use it in a hundred different ways. It doesn't have to have a graphical interface if you don't want one, and there's a surprising number of people who don't want a graphical interface at all, because if you're running an Internet Web server, you don't want to have a screen attached to every machine. In fact, you don't want to have a screen at all. You just want to be able to administer hundreds of machines at the same time, and you don't care about the graphical capabilities.

Well, if you're doing a desktop machine, obviously graphical capabilities are just about the most important part, so you take all these programs available for UNIX and specifically for LINUX and you create a desktop around LINUX, and that's what a lot of people then associate with LINUX is not just the kernel that I'm working on, but all the paraphernalia that goes along with it: the user interfaces, the compilers, the technical programs, and also like the office suites and graphical programs that people tend to associate with Microsoft.

GROSS: You've also been working for the past few years with the Transmeta Corporation. And this is a big commercial corporation, it's a fairly new corporation that's been kind of secretive about what they're developing. Having given away LINUX for free, how has it felt to work in the commercial world?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, as I tried to explain, the giving away LINUX for free was not so much a `for the goodness of my heart' decision as a--that was a much more fun and rewarding way of doing my own project than the alternative. So working for a commercial company doesn't feel like I'm selling myself, because I was never really doing this for idealistic reasons. I was doing it because it was fun. And working for a company has some advantages. It's fun in different ways, and that was one of the real selling points for me as far as Transmeta was concerned was, like LINUX, the things that Transmeta did and does are really technically very advanced and are like cutting-edge technology, which makes them really interesting to work on. And being in a company setting makes for a very different way of doing things, and I kind of enjoy having seen both sides. And actually one of the things I like about how I live my life is that I try to be not too black and white. I have my family's side, I have my work side, I have my LINUX side, and they all melt together well, and I think it makes for a much more interesting experience than somebody who just does one thing and does it in one way.

GROSS: Linus Torvalds is the creator of the LINUX operating system. His new memoir is called "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary." He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music; credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, linguist Geoff Nunberg on why the adverb is his least favorite part of speech. Also, a look at the career of singer Maria Muldaur, and we continue our conversation with Linus Torvalds, creator of the LINUX computer operating system.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Linus Torvalds. He created the computer operating system LINUX. He's a hero of the open source movement, a movement of software pioneers who make the basic code of their software available for free and allow users to modify the code. Torvalds has a new memoir called "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary."

You say in your book that your earliest and happiest memories involve playing with your grandfather's old electronic calculator.

Mr. TORVALDS: Right.

GROSS: He was a professor of statistics at Helsinki University. What did you love about playing with this little calculator?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I mean, I don't know why that calculator has stayed in my mind so well, because it's one of the things I remember from my childhood, how it was--I don't remember how old I was, but I can't have been very old at all. And this was one of the very first calculators that could do more than just the four basic additions, so this calculator was one of the first scientific ones. And it didn't have an LED display like they have now, or one of these regular displays of today. It had an old-fashioned display which had these wires that were glowing and showing the numbers that way, and when it was calculating something, you could really tell. It was thinking hard. And these days, when people use a calculator and it calculates so fast that you get the reply immediately when you press the buttons. This one took like--some calculation took half a minute for it, and it was flashing all the time while it was doing this. So that calculator made a big impression on me, much more than modern-day calculators that are much more powerful.

GROSS: How were you introduced to computers?

Mr. TORVALDS: My grandfather, that very same one, he upgraded his calculator to what to him was a programmable calculator. It was one of the early home computers. It was one of the first ones that he didn't have to actually put together from a kit, but you could actually go out, buy it, just connect the cables, one cable to the TV, one cable to the power mains, and there wasn't even a cable to the keyboard because the keyboard was the computer. They were in the same box and it would just be ready. And to him this was just a much faster calculator that could calculate a lot more complex things than where he could actually tell it to do certain things thousands and millions of times. And I ended up being kind of his Igor then, mad scientist's helper, and helping him type in programs. And he obviously--well, obviously in retrospect wanted me to learn about and become interested in the same things he was, and he certainly succeeded, so it took time.

GROSS: What did you use the computer for yourself?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I mean, when you're, like, 11-, 12-, 13-year-old boy, what you tend to want to do is play games or play around with the computer in not very serious ways. So my first programs were basically, once I started to get really into programming, tended to be very simple games, not very professional at all, not even by the standards of that time. But that's the kind of things I started off doing, and delving more and more into the technical side of the computer. I then started to make programs for my own technical needs, so a lot of my early programs after games were about programming actually. So I wrote programs to help me program better. I think a lot of aspiring programmers start that way.

GROSS: In your book, you say that you made a clone of the video game Pacman.

Mr. TORVALDS: That's one of them. I've always felt that I was a good programmer, even back when I wasn't, but one thing I was never very good at was game design. I did not have that visual ability. I did not have the very important ability to come up with a great idea for a game. So I could program, but I used to make mostly clones of existing games that I'd seen.

GROSS: You probably learned a lot doing that.

Mr. TORVALDS: Oh, yeah. I mean, games especially are very interesting to program because they're really pushing the envelope of what you can do with the computer, especially today when computers are so fast that just about anything you do, the computer is fast enough that you don't even have to think about how you do it. Games are special. Games make you really push the machine.

GROSS: Why does the game push the machine more than just a regular program?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, one of the things is that games are one of the few things where you really notice about real time; real time meaning that when you press a key, if the guy you're moving or whatever, the spaceship you're flying, if that one doesn't react immediately, it's very noticeable from a psychological level. So games really have to be about immediate action if they're action games. And that means that you can't ever afford to take a breather thinking about what you're doing. You have to go full bore all the time, and also especially with graphics, there's a lot of data that you have to process to create a graphical image on the screen, so graphical action games, even though they have a bad name in the sense that a lot of people think they're mind-numbingly boring and maybe even dangerous and make people shoot each other in real life, from a technical perspective as a programmer, they're some of the most exciting things you can do, especially if you're a teen-ager, obviously.

GROSS: What do you love about creating an operating system?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, I don't know. Any act of programming is really--you're creating this world inside the computer, and the operating system to some degree is the most fundamental level of programming you can do in a computer. It actually ties into what Transmeta does, is that Transmeta goes on an even lower level, and that's one of the things that always fascinated me about what we do as a company, too. And there's a thread in my life, in my programming life, that I want to be close to the hardware. I want to really control the world of the computer, and the OS is a large piece of that. And you create your own virtual world. It's not a world of people, it's a world of programs where the OS is kind of the natural laws of that world.

GROSS: Linus Torvalds is my guest, and he's the creator of the operating system LINUX, and he has a new book co-authored with David Diamond called "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary."

There's a company called VA Linux. I'm not sure what exactly they do but I know it's related to LINUX, and you were one of the people who were in on the IPO, the initial public offering, so you got the stock for, you know, the opening price, probably less than the opening price. And the stock did incredibly well at first, but because of this IPO offer, you couldn't sell your stock for six months, and over the course of that six months...

Mr. TORVALDS: Well...

GROSS: Go ahead.

Mr. TORVALDS: Yeah. So I was--there's different classes of stock options and stock offerings and things like that.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. TORVALDS: With a lot of the LINUX companies, what happened was that I actually got stock options like employees of those companies did.

GROSS: I see.

Mr. TORVALDS: It's very common. In fact, it's almost unheard of in Silicon Valley not to get stock options if you work for a technical company. And these companies, even though I wasn't an employee of theirs, they gave me just stock options because they felt that I had done a lot for them. And it actually took a lot of people by surprise, obviously, how well the stock did. This was before the whole dot-com and so on economy bubble burst. So I had not IPO shares, I had stock options from pre-IPO which meant that they were locked up for half a year. It is standard practice that when you give these kind of special options to employees and others at the company before the company has even gone public, the underwriter, the one who actually takes you public and funds you early on, requires that these early people mustn't sell immediately because they want to see the company doing well for some time, and half a year is the standard time. So that was very interesting to see. Slight disconcerting, too, because I saw the best bubble and I certainly saw it starting to burst.

GROSS: Well, how did you react to go from having a whole lot of money on paper, a fortune on paper, to seeing that fortune diminish and diminish and diminish as the stock dropped?

Mr. TORVALDS: Well, in a very real sense, it was free money. It was money that I hadn't asked for. It was obviously money that I had worked for, but not really expected to ever make. And it was a very interesting experience, partly for the psychological reasons, that I could watch my own reaction to actually have that happen. And I'm certainly not complaining. I got a house and a nice car out of it, and that was much more than I ever expected to get out of LINUX in the first place. And it was interesting to see, especially in this area where house prices are just outrageous. For a while, I was concerned about money, and I did not like that feeling. For a while, I felt that I could buy a house, and then I saw my net worth diminish and I was worried about maybe I can't buy a house after all, and after I bought my house, I went back to the good old Linus, the Linus I actually like being, who didn't have to worry about money anymore. And I think that's actually--that was very interesting in my life to, for six months, be this nasty person who cared about money. And everybody should be that, but everybody should be that for no more than six months, because I think that destroys you.

GROSS: Well, some people, though, don't come in to money the way you did, so they have to kind of go on being sorry and resentful but they don't have money to buy a home.

Mr. TORVALDS: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I'm convinced that one of the reasons I never had to care about money is that I come from Finland and it's a fairly--it has a very strong social network as a country, and for example, university was basically free, health care was basically free. So I come from a culture where you kind of don't have to worry about the basics of life, and I think that's one of the reasons why I was able psychologically to just ignore the commercial aspects of LINUX because I'd grown up in a culture where commercial aspects aren't maybe as important as they tend to be in the US.

GROSS: Well, Linus Torvalds, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. TORVALDS: Thanks. It was fun.

GROSS: Linus Torvalds is the creator of the LINUX operating system. His new book is called "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary."