Month: April 2019

Linux is a software company that found legendary success in what is the most influential commercial market: techno-sphere. They share elements of the typical start-up; develop new product, struggle to fund success, (hopefully) go public. It’s not a new story in today’s popular culture, with underdog stories, such as Slack technologies or the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series a few years back, happening every so often, but this was a pretty unique occurrence. For one, it’s not so common that Finland of all places makes something notable, especially at least of appeal here in the States. Additionally, the concept of Linux, free ware operating systems, completely contradicts the free market, as far as sustainability goes. It does go to show the power of hackers in the bazaar.

Through their tenacity, Linus Torvalds and company were able to sell their product without sacrificing their principles, despite the issues they came across in the process. For example, their lack of real structure allowed them to temporarily lose their rights to the Linux name. Composing a team of developers allows for some tight programming, but leaves the legal and business side of things under resourced. These aspects eventually do get serviced, but not without issues coming up beforehand.

However, Linux proved that this type of preplanning is not necessary. They were backed up by partners to continue smooth development, but I don’t think it was merely fortunate circumstances. Torvalds was able to leverage the resources from the University of Helsinki not by mere chance or because he was in the right place in the right time (to a degree), but because he applied himself in the proper way and found a network that believed in his product.

Linus also showed a breath of fresh air to corporate loyalty. He was able to “sell out” without sell out. He got a job with Transmeta, a simple necessity while he had a child on the way to take care of. He defied the questions in the industry of whether he would stay true to his open source principles by standing by said principles. Even as he met with the high ups and made a network, he would openly criticize their closed source models for development. The open source wasn’t just a gimmick to Torvalds, but a belief of humanity to reach the next technological stage.

On the other side of that coin, I do not think another open source success story with the same scope as Linux will ever happen. Linux tapped into an unexplored market and set the foundation for the open source community to find commercial and social success. It was far from the first, with Torvalds being inspired by Richard Stallman in his younger days, but Stallman did to Torvalds what Jaws did to Sharknado. There might be open source projects that gross as much if not more money than Linux, but the proportional impact cannot be the same. After all, a legacy is more than just the bread that the fore runner can bring in.

The cake title is a lie.

Linus Torvalds has been a bit of a legend to me. Not in the way that I aspire to be like him or deify him, but I’ve really only known him for his achievements, mainly creating Linux. That’s what I associate him with. That’s why I get a bit shocked each time somebody mentions he also invented Git. I’ve heard that detail many times, but it always surprises me because I just think of him purely as the creator of Linux. Candidly, I thought he was an elder by this point, if not dead. For this reason, I was absolutely intrigued by the story of his upbringing.

Torvalds’ story plays out like many historical nerds among him. He was a nerd from a young age and was inspired by a computer owned by his family to pursue his interests. I’m sure this trope is used not just to tell the story and draw pity, but to get the reader to connect. Frankly, it’s a bit played out by now. However, Torvalds takes that and uses it well. Even though he describes his nerdy lifestyle and his social ineptness, he doesn’t blame that on his interests. He blames his interests on his interests. He connected to math and physics early in life and was able to use a computer in his childhood.

Notably, Torvalds’ family is comprised of journalists and writers, and he tongue-in-cheekily talks about how he’s the black sheep in that respect. However, if this wasn’t written by a ghost writer, Torvalds’ writing is very well developed. During Birth of a Nerd, he employed the use of second person point-of-view and the present tense. I was genuinely interested by his life at this point.

Additionally, it was super interesting learning about his life in Finland. There’s something about learning about the technological landscape in America time and time again that just burns me out. But seeing it from a completely different perspective was enthralling. And I don’t know much about growing up in the Eastern European countries, it all seems pretty homogeneous to me, but the Torvalds were a black sheep in regard to the Finnish population due to the family speaking Swedish, something I never even considered.

The Finnish background is not just a part of Torvalds’ story, but I also think it was a huge factor to his legacy. He describes the dreariness of Finnish winters, forcing indoor activities and a form of stoicism on him. This I could connect to much more, living in Northern Indiana my entire life. Staying inside and tinkering about on my computer are some of my favorite memories. I’ve even taken to Stoicism myself, even if that is different from the Finnish stoicism.

This lifestyle led Torvalds to just take a genuine passion to computers and programming. This is why Torvalds is so different from the Steve Jobs type. The fruits of his programming were not for a product, but to learn and create. When he tinkered with his Sinclair QL, he was just learning how to interact with the machine and make it do exactly what he wanted it to do. His passion for Unix was genuine drive. While I don’t doubt that Jobs and Gates didn’t actually enjoy programming and learning how the computer worked, I feel like they had an extrinsic drive for money, while Torvalds took to it out of curiosity and little outside influence. Granted, this is a personal assumption, but if I’m going to play couch psychologist on these 3 characters, those seem like a fair difference between them.

Additionally, Torvalds’ story seems more communal. The Homebrew story gives off the impression of people trying to make the next Apple (ha ha). But Torvalds’ work with the Minux newsgroup, Peter Anvin, Ari Lemke, et al. seems more like a love letter to helping people out. It seems like a much healthier basis for an open source community, much like the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT. Again, I don’t really have a proper argument to this other than history and intuition, but that’s that.

While Torvalds’ story is rather inspirational from what I have read, I don’t want to mimic this. In some way, I do feel like I’ve fallen out of love of programming and don’t have the same drive that Torvalds’ did. I can blame this a bit on the culture of Notre Dame, building minds and students suitable for careers instead of passionate minds, but I also am not a nerd in my free time. I don’t love learning about hacking news or making computers purr. I love my friends and video games and movies and music. And I want that to be a part of my story.

I’m at a point in my life where I don’t know which I want to pursue. I still have a wide net in my future. Part of me does want to follow my technological “itch”, but that itch was created by my favorite movie ever, Her by Spike Jonze. I don’t just want OS1 to be created, but I want to personally be a part of that. I want the spread of user information to be spread properly. But I also make music as a hobby. Frankly, I used to want to go into production for a few years, but I’m starting to realize that it should perhaps just be a hobby. But my other artistic passions are still there. Whether that is in the form of making music or making movies, I want to share my story in an aesthetic way. I have my foot in the door for technology, but not the arts. I also want the best for everyone and maybe go into politics someday. I would like to touch base on all of these passions, but I’m more concerned with what’s ahead of me and the uncertainty of it all at the moment.

Many a software in this day and age receives regular patches. Whether it is for minor stability fixes or additional features, it is not uncommon to be asked to update your product before using it. Some may argue that this is due to lazy/rushed programming before launch, which is partially true in some cases, but not for the majority of updates. I get updates for iTunes maybe every other week, but it’s usually for something minor, like stability fixes or security patches, but would that really be considered lazy if something can only be found by crowdsourcing the stress testing? Or something like Discord, with updates that bring very welcome features that could not exist at launch, coming from such a small company. While software used to come as it was ~20 years ago, continual updates are how the system works now.

And that is one of the reasons open source is essential in the business sense. Software cannot be made one-and-done anymore, there requires constant review of the software and constant fixes to that code for something to compete. Businesses can utilize open source for the free software, of course, but they can also operate ON that free software, producing open source programs for people to use. That may not make sense, since there’s no guaranteed profit, but let’s study Mozilla.

Mozilla makes a free web browser, Mozilla FireFox, on top of plenty of other products, such as ThunderBird and SeaMonkey. They understand the value of open source by making all of their products open source, and they have created the #4 most popular web browser today and generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But they do this by way of royalties with other web corporations that rely on FireFox to distribute their content and set their services as the default, such as Google and Yahoo.

That’s on the corporate side of things, but what about the development? Since everything is open source, most of the development is handled by users that donate their time and skills to fix issues and help implement patches in a timely manner. There are Mozilla employees that aid in this as well, but they do it in tandem with the open source community. This allows the company to operate at a much larger scale by having more hands on the code. These developers volunteer often because Mozilla stands for their values, i.e. the open source community.

On top of the royalties, Mozilla makes money off of donations, whether that comes from money directly or things like merchandising, which honestly only makes the loyalty towards the brand even stronger.

Just one more brief examples is encyclopedias. Those book sets used to be common to see, whether in a library or somebody’s personal study (not so common). But once people understood the Internet, Wikipedia came and made these sets obsolete. This was in part of the ease of use, but also how fast information was being added by crowd sourcing the labor. A print encyclopedia can be obsolete the day it is printed, but Wikipedia allows for instant updates. However, encyclopedia companies have transitioned to the Internet, but their services are held in less regard because they were too late and they rely on different systems of funding (ads vs. Wikipedia’s donation drives).

The open source business model is a broken system that can easily be exploited, but it’s not unruly. People will give money to products they believe in, and there is value in being a popular product. Whether that’s just a means of selling user data or ad space, it’s definitely sustainable. And the “contract” work from the open source community allows for up to date products and user satisfaction.

ESR claims the open-source approach prevents a business from “getting rent from the secret bits”, but I think that’s a dated way of viewing open source. While there is benefit from having something your competitors don’t have, there’s also benefit in having free workers making a product they can safely enjoy under the directive vision of the corporation. It is not for every company – EA is not going to adopt the open source approach in their video games – but companies that can utilize it, like IBM, recognize how important open-source is and how it will influence the future of technology. I look forward to see how IBM helps grow Red Hat and how IBM grows with it. It’s certainly a good time to work for Big Blue.