Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (22 page)

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.

Somebody coined the phrase “Benevolent Dictator” to describe how I ran the whole thing. The first time I heard the term, all I could think of was some sunny-nation general with a dark mustache handing out bananas to his starving masses. I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the Benevolent Dictator image. I control the Linux kernel, the foundation of it all, because, so far, everybody connected with Linux trusts me more than they trust anyone else. My method for managing the project with hundreds of thousands of developers is the same as it was when I coded away in my bedroom: I don’t proactively delegate as much as I wait for people to come forward and volunteer to take over things. It started when I divested myself of the responsibilities I found less interesting, like the user-level code. People stepped forward and offered to take over the subsystems. Everything filters up to me through the maintainers of those subsystems.

I approve or disapprove of their work, but mostly I let things happen naturally. If two people are maintaining similar kinds of things, I accept both of them to see which gets used. Sometimes they both get used but wind up taking different paths. Once, there was intense competition between two people who insisted on sending patches that fought each other’s patches. I refused to accept patches from either, until one of the developers lost interest. That’s how King Solomon would have handled things if he ran a preschool.

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.

My approach made headlines.

But the irony here is that while my Linux management style, such as it is, was earning high marks in the press, I was an undeniable failure during my brief stint as a manager at Transmeta. At one point, it was decided that I should manage a team of developers. I flopped. As anyone who has ventured into my junk heap of an office knows, I’m totally disorganized. I had trouble managing the weekly progress meetings, the performance reviews, the action items. After three months it became obvious that my management style wasn’t doing anything to help Transmeta, despite the praise I was getting from journalists for the way I was running Linux.

Meanwhile, the press kept pounding away at another issue: fragmentation. Those who have followed the rocky, unhappy history of Unix know about the endless bickering between Unix vendors. The question came up all the time in 1998: Would history repeat itself in the world of Linux? My answer was always that while there undoubtedly is bickering among Linux vendors, it can’t lead to the fragmentation that has kept Unix a perennial almost-been. The problem with Unix is that competing vendors wasted years implementing similar features, simply because they didn’t have access to the same source base. Developing the same features independently not only cost Unix years but it also led to bloody infighting. Sure, I would tell the press, Linux vendors don’t host regularly scheduled Love-Ins. But there is and will continue to be less fragmentation inside the Linux community than in the Unix community, because even Linux vendors who are not friendly can see the same source base and can reuse each other’s work. The source code is a repository from which anyone can draw.

The more journalists started grasping such concepts, the more I liked meeting them. (Unlike the journalists I remember from my youth in Helsinki, most of them in the United States in the 1990s were sober.) I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to debate with them.

But speaking was another matter entirely. I’m not what you’d call a natural performer. Remember: I’m the fellow who barely left his bedroom throughout his childhood. I never was very good at even
writing
speeches, so I always waited until the night before an event to prepare.

Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. Typically, I would step out to the podium and people would rise to their feet and applaud even before I opened my mouth. I don’t want to sound unappreciative, but I’ve always found that to be an embarrassing situation. Anything you say sounds wrong, even my standard, “Thanks, Now Please Sit Down.” I’m open to suggestions.

But not all the calls were from journalists or conference organizers. One night I was sitting at home with Tove. We were reading to the girls. The phone rang.

I answered: “Torvalds.”

“Uh. Is this the Linux guy?”

“Yes.”

Two seconds of silence.
Click.

Another night a fellow from Las Vegas phoned me at home, trying to get me to sign on with some Linux T-shirt business.

The obvious solution would have been to get an unlisted phone number. I didn’t bother to do that when we first moved to California because it was more expensive than having a listed number. I’ve since learned the price you pay for being so frugal, and am now unlisted. Once, before I got de-listed, David misplaced my home number and phoned directory assistance. He asked for my number, and the operator who provided it said with great astonishment, “
He’s listed? With all his millions?”

But no, there weren’t millions. Millions of Linux users, sure. Not millions of dollars for Linus.

And that was perfectly fine.

VII

Most days I wake up thinking I’m the luckiest bastard alive. I don’t remember if Wednesday, August 11, 1999 was one of those days, but it should have been.

It was the second day of the Linux World convention and trade show which had been taking place at the San Jose Convention Center. Dirk Hohndel, who is CEO of SuSE and traveled from Germany for the trade show, had spent the night on the guest bed in our family room. I’ve known him for years. He’s one of the old XFree86 people, and is on the graphics side of Linux. He’s also Daniela’s godfather. I woke up, made cappuccino for Tove and Dirk, read everything in the San Jose Mercury News except the sports pages and the classified ads—like I always do—and then we piled into the Toyota Rav4 for the ten-mile trip to downtown San Jose.

I remember shaking a lot of hands.

This was the day that Red Hat would be going public. The company had years earlier given me stock options, and had only recently sent me some paperwork that I never bothered to look at. It sat somewhere in a stack of papers near my computer. I remember I really wanted Red Hat to do well. It wasn’t so much a matter of being excited about the options—I didn’t quite realize what they meant. I was extremely jazzed for another reason. In many respects, the IPO’s success would be a validation of Linux. So I was a bit nervous that morning, but I wasn’t the only one. The market had been doing poorly for weeks, and people wondered whether or not Red Hat would even pull off its IPO.

The “liquidity event” did, in fact, happen. We got word on the conference floor that Red Hat’s initial public offering came in at $15. Or was it $18? I don’t remember. The important thing was that it ended the first day of trading at $35. Nothing record-breaking, but it was okay.

I remember driving home with Tove and Dirk in the car, first feeling relieved. Then, when I thought about the money, growing excited. Only when we were stuck in Northbound traffic on Highway 101 did it strike me that in one day I had gone from basically zero to half a million dollars. My heart started beating faster. It was elation tempered with disbelief.

I was clueless about stock and decided I needed to find out what to do next. So I phoned Larry Augustin, VA Linux’s CEO. I told him he was the only person I knew who had a clue about how stock works. My exact words: “Do you have like a stockbroker or somebody that you trust because I don’t want to go on eBay?”

Red Hat had given me options—not an outright grant of stock. I didn’t know what to do about exercising them. I knew there might be a lockup period but I didn’t know if it applied to me, and I hadn’t thought about the tax consequences. Larry, who is good at this sort of thing and who knows a lot of people, got me in touch with this guy at Lehman Brothers, who shouldn’t have been handling me at all because I wasn’t a big customer. He promised to find out what I should do. Meanwhile, two days after the IPO, I got an email from someone in Red Hat’s Human Resources Department, or their lawyer, in which they mentioned something about the stock having split before the IPO. I knew nothing about it. So I tracked down the manila envelope containing all the stock option paperwork I had never bothered to read, and there it was, in plain (for legalese) English: My options had magically doubled.

My half-million dollars was actually a
million
dollars!

Regardless of the image that has caught on in the press, of me as a selfless geek-for-the-masses living under a vow of poverty, I was, frankly, delirious.

There, I said it.

I sat down and read all the Red Hat papers. Yes, I was subject to a 180-day lockup.

Now I had a new sport (or a sport, period): keeping track of Red Hat’s stock price, which continued escalating during the following six months. It went up gradually and jumped a few times and just grew and grew. At one point, Red Hat even split once more. At best, I was worth $5 million from the options.

Red Hat started relatively low and inched skyward as Wall Street, in the throes of its love affair with anything even remotely related to the Internet, “discovered” Linux. We were the Flavor of the Month during the cold-weather months at the end of 1999. Investment pundits on television and in the general press couldn’t get enough of this crazy little operating system that was promising to upend Microsoft. My phone rang constantly. It all reached a stunning climax with the VA Linux IPO on December 9th. That was an endorsement beyond anyone’s expectation.

Larry Augustin and I went up to San Francisco to be on site at the offices of First Boston Credit Suisse for the IPO. I was wearing what I always wear: a freebie T-shirt and sandals. We brought our wives and kids. It was a crazy scene with the toddlers running around among the buttoned-down investment bankers.

It all happened so suddenly. Figures streamed across monitors indicating that VA Linux, on the first day of trading, was selling in the $300-a-share range. This was unheard of. Even if we hadn’t seen the figures, we would have known it was a record because of the way the investment bankers were hypnotized by CNN and the Bloomberg financial channel. For his part, Larry was his usual cool self. I don’t think he batted an eyelash during the whole thing. I wouldn’t know for sure, because I was busy chasing after my daughters.

Even the dwellers of Madagascar’s rainforests probably were aware of how rich it all made Larry. He had driven up to San Francisco without much of a financial net worth, and drove back to Silicon Valley worth something on the order of $1.6 billion. And, as the press continually pointed out, he was still in his twenties.

For my part, I had been given a stock grant and options for shares in VA Linux. As with Red Hat, I couldn’t sell shares for six months. But unlike Red Hat, which climbed steadily, VA Linux had nowhere to go but down. After its record-setting opening day, the stock dropped steadily for a year, reaching a low point of 6.62. Partly, the stock was a victim of the market correction that hurt most technology stocks that April. But also, Linux’s stint as Flavor of the Month had ended with the spring thaw. Because of the VA Linux lockup period, I couldn’t take advantage of the hyper market while it lasted. It was psychologically much harder to follow the company than it had been to follow Red Hat, to know that every night when I crawled into bed, I would wake up with a lessened financial net worth.

But I still felt like the luckiest bastard alive.

“
This money thing is driving me crazy,” he says.’ Just the waiting for the lock-up period to end. It’s like having lots of money but
not
having lots of money. It’s on my mind constantly.’”

“
Up until now, we almost never had more than $5,000 in our checking account. Except for some stocks and stuff we have for savings that we can’t touch, that was all the money we had to spend.
So now
I have all this money on paper and—”