Month: April 2019

Linus Torvalds is a success. He began one of the biggest operating systems in the world. Considering his competition is with the likes of Microsoft and Apple, that is incredible. What he began all those years ago still competes with some of the biggest companies in the world today. While that is definitely true, he seems to have stumbled into success. Torvalds is and has always been a programming genius, but he never cared about business. A prime example of this was when the man from boston trademarked Linux and attempted to use it to make money off of Linux companies. Torvalds was totally unprepared for this. He only thought about the programming. He was still working his way through school, and working on Linux in his free time, he never considered someone essentially attempting to make money off his work in this type of way. In true Torvalds fashion the solution was too look to the community. They ended up gathering money through the community to fight the trademark. This is probably the biggest difference between Torvalds and any of the big software companies. He leans on the community to create his work, where the companies traditionally just work on it internally and then send it out when they’re ready to make money. Torvalds is the poster child for the potential of open source, but I’m not sure we’ll ever see anything quite like it again. To get that level of success in open source, to create that kind of community required a very specific kind of person. Torvalds is criticised for being very short with people, for being extremely critical and inflammatory, however he still looks to people for the community. The openness of the community is what is important to him. He doesn’t care about trying to make money, about trying to create the next big product. It takes a person who doesn’t care about these things, but also has the technical ability to follow through and create these great projects, to have an open source success story like Torvalds. The probability of that happening again are not likely. While Torvalds definitely shows the power and the potential of open source, he also shows the requirements. Torvalds doesn’t operate like a business person, because he’s not. He works like a hacker from one of the earlier books we read this semester. He lives and breaths programming. He works on something because he’s interested in it. He doesn’t work a nine to five shift. He programmes all the time, because that’s what he loves, and what he wants to do. He doesn’t work in a good business model because that doesn’t work for him. To have someone that meets all of those requirements and also doesn’t want to have a get rich quick scheme as part of their work, is very rare and very unlikely to be seen again. There are a lot of circumstances that led to Torvalds becoming what he is today, but perhaps the biggest this was his personality. While there is more support for an open source community today, there is also much more obvious and easier paths to monetary reward for code. Overall, I never expect to see a story like Linus again.

Linus Torvalds is like a rock star to me. Though not in the way one might expect. To me rock stars are people to look at and say, “man it would be awesome to be able to play an instrument like that, but I don’t want to be a rock star.” Rock stars, and Linus Torvalds, have a great talent. They are some of the most talented and smartest people in the world, but I do not envy them. There is so much that comes along with being a rock star that I would not want as part of my life. I don’t want to deal with the depression most fight with. The drugs, the demons, and hatred. There is so much of it that is associated with being a rock star that I want nothing to do with. Especially because the road to being a rock star has all of these faults, and most people break down somewhere on that road and never reach real rock stardom. I feel the same about Linus Torvalds. Linus’ life, especially the early life, sounds very lonely and sad. He has and has had a hard time connecting with people and with dealing with life. He is an incredible programmer, possibly because he preferred interacting with computers than with people, and it is great that he found what makes him happy, but there is a lot in his past that I wish to avoid. I don’t want to be Linus Torvalds. But I also don’t want to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Gates and Jobs are, or were, constantly under a microscope, everything they’ve ever done has been closely examined and dissected. What strike me most about Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, and rock stars is that they seem to be born with this drive, for computing or business or music, but I don’t have this drive in any of those areas. I don’t live and breath computers, business, or music. If I could choose a public figure that I could be like it wouldn’t be any of those people. It would be Derek Jeter. Derek Jeter was and is one of the greatest baseball players to ever play they game. For that reason, he is under a lot of scrutiny, which again I am not a big fan of, but he handles it so well. Derek Jeter has an air of professionalism about him. He never cursed out a reporter or his teammate who he thought was doing poorly. He worked hard on himself and led by example. Derek Jeter is undmistakedly an incredible baseball player, but most of that came from his hard work and determination to succeed. There are stories about him spending hours upon hours in the batting cage when he was in a slump. I also feel like athletes are better role models than rock stars, because there is a clear path to success. Start with t-ball and work your way up. There will of course be bumps in the road, but if you fall off the road, you can usually land on your feet, which doesn’t seem to be true of rock stars or programmers. Torvalds also relied mostly on himself, both for his operating system and for life, this seems like a very dangerous way to live a life. I have a few programming projects I think would be a lot of fun to work on, but the main itch I have, that I want to solve, would be to make a movie, probably animated, but to create a story, scenes, and sound design for a film and have it all come together in the end. I am not trying to do this with no support though, building it from scratch, I have learned a lot of tools through my FTT major and have support to follow my hobby by my friends and family, that I feel is a big difference than Torvalds. Another difference is he was successful in his fun project while I probably won’t be.

Open source companies have never made sense to me as a viable business model. The idea is that people who aren’t being paid will contribute to a project, because they are interested, and then someone else will make money with that project. It seems very counter intuitive to me. I like the idea of people working on projects for free and offering them to the community for free, but that other people will take advantage of these projects for their own benefit sounds like exactly the situation napster was in a few years ago. Napster making money off of other people’s work. However, that appears to be the way the business is going. As companies “open up” to open source, providing programs to the community and what not, open source is beginning to enter a new stage. As I talked about last week, people will often contribute to open source projects just because they are interested. Personally however, I would feel weird if the open source projects were then used by someone else to make money. I think the current model will be good for software quality but not good for community experience. As more people profit from the technology, such as when Google sells their android operating system, I think less contributors are going to want to contribute. It goes back to the idea of the homebrew computer club. When Bill Gates said that people should be able to make money from their code, people were upset, but if it wasn’t their code they couldn’t really complain. Now, however, someone else could profit from your code and all you would receive is a shout out in a README. ESR talks about how peer review is better in open source than closed source, however, with the current model I don’t feel like peer review is being benefited from the most. Because a large portion of the market is working for profit there are always other considerations when working on open source projects today. But also, this collecting rent in the close source is not to be sniffed at. A lot of great programs have come from a closed source space. Undoubtedly Maya is a better animation platform than, though from the comment about peer review ESR would suggest otherwise. I feel the current marketplace is most confusing with regards to security and privacy. According to some of the main tenets of computer security a peer reviewed security system is much better than a non peer reviewed option, therefore theoretically open source would be better for security. However, open source, especially the open core business model, requires that to make a profit privacy becomes a secondary consideration. Companies that benefit greatly from open core, especially google profit off of commoditizing a person’s privacy therefore completely undermining much of computer security. I just feel like open core is a world of contradictions that cannot survive for long. To truly support the open source community and make sure it remains truly open source there has to be some separation between open source and open core, or closed source. The magic cauldron has never made sense to me but I feel like if it isn’t already broken it will be soon.