Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (25 page)

This is not a minor point. Stallman, who deserves a monument in his honor for giving birth to the GPL, was inspired to jump-start the free software phenomenon mainly because he was shut out of a succession of interesting development projects when they moved from the open, academic world of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the proprietary corporate environment. The most notable of these was the LISP machine. LISP started out as part of the artificial intelligence community. As with many things, somebody thought it was so good that they should form a startup to make it a commercial success and make money on it. This happens all the time at universities. But Richard wasn’t part of the commercial crowd, so when LISP became a commercial project under a company named Symbolics in 1981, suddenly he was cut off. To add insult to injury, Symbolics hired away many of his cohorts from the AI lab.

The same thing happened to him a few other times. The way I understand it, his motivation for promoting open source was not so much anticommercial as it was antiexclusion. For him, open source is about not getting left out. It’s about being able to continue working on a project regardless of who makes it commercial.

The GPL is wonderful in its gift of letting anyone play. Just think about what a major advance for humanity that is! But does that mean that every innovation should be GPL’d?

No way! This is the abortion issue of technology. It should be up to the individual innovator to decide for herself or himself whether to GPL the project or to use a more conventional approach to copyright. The thing that drives me crazy about Richard is that he sees everything in black and white. And that creates unnecessary political divisions. He never understands the viewpoint of anybody else. If he were into religion, you would call him a religious fanatic.

In fact, the most annoying thing—second only to religious enthusiasts knocking on my door saying what I should believe in—is people knocking on my door (or bombarding me with email) saying how I should license my software. This should not be a political issue. People should be able to make up their own minds. It’s one thing to suggest to someone that they consider GPLing their software, and then leaving it at that. It’s another thing to argue the point. It’s really bad when people complain about the fact that I work for a commercial company that doesn’t GPL everything it does. I tell them it’s not their business.

The thing I find hugely irritating about Richard is not that he believes that Linux—because its kernel relied on applications from the gnu software project—should more rightly be called “gnu/Linux.” It is not that he openly resents me for being a poster boy for open source even though he was sharing code while I was still sleeping in a laundry basket. No, the reason I find him so pesty is that he continually complains about other people not using the GPL.

I admire Richard from afar for a bunch of reasons. And I guess I tend to respect people, like Richard, who have very strong moral opinions. But why can’t they keep these opinions to themselves? The thing I dislike the most is when people tell me what I should or should not do. I absolutely despise people who think they have any say over my personal decisions. (Except, perhaps, my wife.)

Over the course of the development of Linux, pundits such as Eric Raymond have suggested that the operating system’s success and the longevity of open source development have partly hinged on my pragmatic approach and my ability to keep from taking sides in disputes. While Eric is arguably the best articulator of the open-source phenomenon (and while I strongly, strongly disagree with his pro-gun sentiments), I believe he’s a bit off the mark on his perception of me. It’s not that I keep from taking sides. It’s just that I so strongly resent anyone who tries to impose his or her morals on others. You can replace the word, “morals” with “religion,” “computing preferences,” whatever.

Just as imposing morals is wrong, the next step—
institutionalizing
morals—is doubly wrong. I’m a big believer in individual choice, which means that I think I should make my own decisions when it comes to moral issues.

I want to decide for myself. I’m very much against unnecessary rules imposed by society. I’m a big believer that you should be able to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home as long as you don’t hurt anybody else. Any law saying otherwise is a very, very broken law. And there are laws that say otherwise. I find some scary rules, especially some that are imposed on schools and children. Imagine even thinking of imposing rules about teaching evolution, and taking that into the wrong direction. That I find scary. This is social conscience rearing its ugly head in places it really has nothing at all to do with.

At the same time, my personal belief is that what is more important than me and my individual moral decisions is, not even the human race, but
evolution.
To that extent, I want my individual choices to take social issues into account. But that’s probably built in. I think it is built into human biology—evolution—that we do take social things into account. Otherwise we’d have been gone long ago.

The only other thing worth ranting about: people who are too preachy. There’s just no reason for folks to evangelize, and to be so self-righteous about it.

And I’m sounding just like one of them.

But it’s an easy trap when people start taking you far too seriously.

XI

Americans make a big fuss over March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day), May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), and October 12th (Columbus Day), but hardly any attention is paid to December 6th, which as any Finn can tell you is Finnish Independence Day.

Most folks in Finland celebrate Finnish Independence Day the way they celebrate everything else, by partying to excess. They party-to-excess—even by Finnish standards—the night before and recover in front of the television set for almost the entire national holiday. The option, I guess, is to go out and trudge in the snow hung over.

What keeps everyone glued to their TV sets is a single event: the President’s Ball. Finland doesn’t have much in the way of high society so the President’s Ball is pretty much it, the only truly big society event. It’s televised nationally to keep people from driving with hangovers and to prove to ourselves that we can stage our own respectable version of the Academy Awards. No, a better metaphor: It’s the Super Bowl of Finnish high society.

So throughout the day, from Utsjoki in the north to Hanko in the south, Finns munch on gravlax and aspirin as they watch a procession of invitees—men in tailcoats and women in outrageous (for Scandinavia) evening attire—shake hands with the president.

Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine was the year I got invited.

You automatically get invited if you’re an ambassador to Finland or if you’re part of the Finnish parliament. Maybe one hundred or two hundred random people are invited on various grounds. They may have won a medal in the Olympics or maybe they helped the president on his campaign. If you are the captain of the ice hockey team and you’ve just won the world championship, you get invited. If the operating system you created gains worldwide attention, you get an invitation. Spouses and companions come, too.

In fact, it was lucky that Tove and I could go at all. In August we had applied to the INS for permission to go to Finland and return. We weren’t approved until early November. Two weeks later we received our invitation to the President’s Ball.

Now imagine what it’s like. Picture 2,000 Finns—and not even the most important 2,000 Finns—packed into the president’s castle. It was a home that had been built for a Russian merchant. It really is just a large home, not exactly a one-family home but maybe a home for one family that has a lot of support—cooks, maids, and the like. It’s not a huge place.

So you arrive. Someone takes your coat and then you’re just jammed in there. You don’t know where to go. Bowls of punch proliferate. Obviously, they contain vodka. This wouldn’t be Finland if they didn’t. It basically takes a while to find people to talk to. You end up speaking to journalists, because, frankly, they’re the most interesting people there. (Maybe it was the punch that made them seem more interesting than a parliament member from, say, Lahti.)

I didn’t expect it to be much fun, because I wouldn’t know many people there. I was the only one from the open source crowd invited. I expected it to be like the army—more enjoyable to talk about later. But it actually
was
fun.

Tove wore a green gown that would have been stunning and attracted media attention even if we were at the Oscars, not the Finnish President’s Ball. Because she looked so good, and because Finland hadn’t won the world ice hockey championship that year, the press dubbed us King and Queen of the Ball.

Whatever.

Nicke Torvalds is visiting. Father and son return from a trip to the old duplex in a rented BMW
Z3.
It’s the model Linus will soon be purchasing, and Nicke will drive it to the Stanford University library this afternoon. But first, he leans against the hot tub, situated in the unlandscaped backyard, and announces that this is the largest house anyone named Torvalds has ever owned. Then he takes a piece of paper and lists all twenty Torvaldses. He didn’t know that a twenty-first was on its way.

“
Did you ever think our house would be this big?” Tove asks me.

I wanted Linus to give me his thoughts on a chapter entitled,
“
Will Success Spoil Me?” and took the girls outside to the beach so he could read it undisturbed. Patricia and Daniela spent maybe a half hour hunting for starfish and tiptoeing into the water, after which one of them announced
“Kisin kommer,”
which translates to: “I’ve got to potty.”

XII

It’s easy to fight windmills if you don’t realize how hard it is.

Five years ago when people asked me if I thought Linux would be able to take over the desktop and make a dent in Microsoft, they always had a doubtful edge to their voice. I invariably told them that I thought it would. They would look skeptical. The fact is, they probably knew more than I did about the reality.

I didn’t really understand all the steps it would take to get there. Not only what it takes to tackle the technical problems of developing a robust and portable operating system, but what it takes to make that operating system a commercial, as well as technical, success. I would have been discouraged if I had known in advance just how much infrastructure would need to be in place to make Linux as successful as it has been. It’s not only that you have to be good. You have to be good, sure, but everything has to turn out the right way, too.

Any sane person would have gazed up at the rugged mountain-face that needed to be scaled, and would have been absolutely daunted. Just think about the technical problems of supporting PCs, which are about the most varied hardware out there. You have to support people who have bugs that you can’t reproduce on applications that you don’t even care about. But you care about Linux, so you care about helping to fix them.

Even to think about penetrating the commercial market, you have to have a respectable level of user support. From early on with Linux, you could have real support by doing it internally within a company. But to make it in a big way, you have to have a lot of people and a lot of infrastructure. It’s not enough to have a 1900 number or a 1-800 number for the first thirty days. To some extent, support is no longer much of an issue because it can be bought at any number of places—Linuxcare, Red Hat, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Compaq, Dell. But it clearly was something that had to be in place. For the longest time, I didn’t even realize that. It has been a major challenge for years.

Unlike business people with solid technical backgrounds or journalists with a commercial bent, I was a narrowly focused software developer who was naive about what would be required. The technical problems alone would have kept me from embarking on this journey. If I had known how much work it would take, and that I would still be doing it ten years later—and that it would be almost a full-time job those entire ten years—I never would have started.