Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers

For readers with high sensitivity to grammar errors access to this page is explicitly prohibited :-)

Chapter 4: Grand Replicator aka Benevolent Dictator

(A slightly skeptical unauthorized biography of Linus Torvalds
and the chronicle of the first ten years of Linux)

Version 0.97

Contents

• Introduction

• The life at a glance (of an accidental neo-conservative revolutionary ;-)

• Finland period

• Selling Bazaar to Cathedral (Linux Hype Festival and IPO Gold Rush)

• Burst of Technobubble

• Big Business and Linux

• The Sunset of Linux Hype

• Kernel in Pain

• Summing up

• Linus Torvalds related humor

• Webliography to the chapter

• Supplement 1: Linus's Interviews Collection

Introduction

Linux like Unix in general is a major democratic OS and a major democratic social force in computing despite the fact that the development of the kernel is ruled with iron fist by Linus Torvalds. Along with DOS, Unix was among the first a democratic operating system that helped  people to get rid of the power of the corporate and university "computer center" bureaucracy and Linux continues this tradition. Paradoxically Linux never got an upper hand technically in fierce  competition with FreeBSD and never even approached the security of OpenBSD or platform independence of NetBSD.  It was blatantly "gray" OS that achieved success exactly like Microsoft of Unix world.  I think that one of the main achievement of Linux is it's counterbalancing value and positive influence on Microsoft and Sun: it did contributed to the lessening what is called the "operating system tax" (while the cost of Microsoft OSes in the USA is very competitive, this is not true for other countries).  And this influence of Linux on Microsoft is very important and should not be underestimated. It is especially important for developing countries, because PCs in those countries very often contain components for which Linux drivers are non-existent.

At the same time Linux itself should be viewed as a classic story of betrayal of the movement roots: commercialization of GPL-based software created  by volunteers and used to enrich several "open source pigs" including Linus Torvalds himself. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the animals on a small farm revolt against the farmer and create a seemingly utopian world in which all animals share the labor and the fruits of that labor. If you have never read George Orwell's barnyard parable, go out and buy yourself a copy; try not to be alarmed at how closely the farm mirrors the Linux world. In Animal Farm, a new order is established with lots of talk about freedom, but a rigid hierarchy was almost instantly established and "top pigs" start to enrich themselves and oppress others using the credo "All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others." If you are tempted to think that Orwell's gloomy story is nothing more than an anti-totalitarism fairy tale, read on. It really has more dimensions that simple decrying of the horrors of totalitarism. Corrupt evangelists shouting "Four legs good, two legs bad" are not limited to one particular euro-Asian country ;-)

This commercialization betrayed the academic roots of free/open source software and created both "open source millionaires" and "open source politics" not that different from regular corporate politics with sleazy corporate lobbyists, image making and PR assaults on opponents. In Linux startups the stakeholders who can influence the decisions (owners and management clan) immensely enriched themselves to the disadvantage of the remaining stakeholders. During "Linux gold rush" the "rank and file"  stockholders were openly milked and cheated by those influential stakeholders. 

Paradoxically despite the fact that due to the commercialization the character of the movement radically changed and it became corporate-controlled and profit-oriented, most members of the Linux community still exhibit the characteristics of "true believers" -- they cannot accept criticism of their belief object, and will, given the opportunity, pour scorn and derision on the proponents of alternatives, or even on those who simply don't believe in the object of their blind faith. As Goethe mentioned "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
               
This chapter also documents the phenomenon that later was coined as the Fading Altruism of Open Source Development and very strong corporate influence on Linux development including IPO rip-offs ("Linux gold rush") that enriched quite a few "open source pigs" as well as big business manipulation of Linux technical priorities and goals: big companies, especially IBM, are using the open-source community as subcontractors rather than encouraging the community to develop independent products. We will be limited to the "glorious period" of Linux history, the period before Linux became open season for lawyers. This started with the SCO lawsuit which is not covered in the chapter.

I would like to remind the reader that this chapter title contains the word "skeptical". The analysis below not only lacks typical for "true believers" excessive excitement about the technical qualities of Linux kernel (it was never  able to surpass FreeBSD that used for development a tiny fraction of resources), but has a definite anti  "cult of personality" flavor.  I hope this page can serve as a antidote to "Great Chairman Linus Torvalds who single-handedly leads lemmings toward the bright future" stories in mainstream media. We need to realize that open source politics relies on manipulation. Since Linus Torvalds, open source leaders became political figures and it has become impossible to discuss them without asking such questions as: What is Linus Torvalds "real" character? How authentic or inauthentic his coverage in the mainstream media is? What image is he trying to project?

Contrary to naive (or crooked) accounts about shy Finn, Linus has a "supersized" (but  well camouflaged in public appearances  ;-) ego and as you can infer from the facts presented below it was always the case.  Both Linus' parents are journalists, and he probably inherited a journalistic talent and understands pretty well how important is to project the right public image of humbleness to create contrast that increases a "superhero effect". To get a better sense of him, read the kernel traffic list. In this list he's far from the laid-back, mellow regular guy as he usually appears in the interviews.  He is very opinionated and extremely competitive to the point of being very rude to people dissenting from his "party line"; he is perfectly capable in flaming people, solutions or ideas he doesn't like even when those are better ideas or solutions.

I also think that Linus' cult of personality is one of the  most significant negative moments of the movement for various reasons propagated by such different people/groups including but not limited to Eric Raymonds, Slashdot founders, Slate's  Andrew Leonard, Linux distributors, etc. That's why this chapter can be considered as a modest attempt to address "Linux mythology" issue. All-in-all in this chapter I will try to paint a vivid picture of a talented, colorful and sharply individualistic Linux dictator:  one of the most fascinating figures among open source pioneers. It's important to understand that this chapter was written as an antidote to publications emulating North Korean party newspapers articles that depict achievement of the party leaders with just substitution of Linux and Linus Torvalds in several places ;-).

Along with this goal, this chapter also tries to answer several important questions

• Why Linus Torvalds can be considered the first "post-modern" technical leader, the first whose image was purposefully manipulated for political reasons, without regard to real accomplishments. By focusing on the forces that led to Linus Torvalds rise, this chapter tries to demonstrate how "fearless technical leaders" images in open source politics aren't simply products created by a particular individual -- they are, in fact, the result of complex forces of interaction of "techno culture" and corporate world. During Linus Torvalds long tenure on the technical stage many programmers begin to realize how deeply the current OS popularity is dependent on PR manipulation. Since Linus Torvalds, open source leaders became political figures and it has become impossible to discuss them without asking such questions as: What is Linus Torvalds "real" character? How authentic or inauthentic is he? What image is he trying to project?  Was he a poster boy for big guys helping to rip off suckers in the stock market ?
  
  The rise of Linux was marked with the sharp acceleration of the trend to commodization of software products,  when substance was replaced by flashy RB companies and like in many other fields  brand became more important then technical qualities.
   

• One of the fundamental problem of open source movements like Linux kernel development is the problem of altruism. While Linux was started as an altruistic volunteer project, the situation drastically changed with the first startups and IPOs. At this point Linux pretty quickly seized to be a volunteer developed OS and became some weird mixture of "brain drain" (mainly from Europe) and outsourcing (to Asia). It can be even claimed that there is a substantial component of the movement that views open source development as a "loss leader": it sacrifices many young talented programmers from other countries in order to establish a reputation necessary to get a few a highly played job (often in the USA).  While definitely not encompassing, this kind of motivation can help to explains demographics of open source development (with Europe and LA as dominant regions), and, in particular, why the phenomenon seems prevalent among young college-educated men including Linus Torvalds himself (who moved to the USA with the explicit goal to become rich). As David Lancashire aptly noted the appropriate analogy for open source development might be not "cooking-pots" or "cauldrons", but Mayflower. This "Mayflower" component of open source can be played in many different ways, for example:

  • For achieving the goal of "real" (horizontal) immigration to USA from other country (as in case of Torvalds, Miguel De Icaza,  Guido van Rossum, etc)

  • For "virtual immigration" (immigration up) as in case of using open source credentials as the key for opening doors to highly paid (usually by USA firms) corporate/consultant  position (Jeremy Allison, Alan Cox, Theodore Tso).

  • As a way to become a (rich) founder of high-tech startup (Marc Ewing, Marc Andreesen, John Ousterhout,  Michael Tiemann, Tatu Ylönen)

  • As a way to sell your reputation for the position of an evangelist (Bruce Perens) or a member of the board  (Eric Raymond) in some established company or a well-funded startup rushing toward IPO.

  This desire for enrichment, get rich quick IPO schemes, blatant self-promotion, blatant propaganda and disinformation typical for such electronic press outlets as Slashdot and Linux Today, etc make us suspect that along with honest academic style developers who are just doing their job much like Free/Open/NetBSD developers there is an "Orwell's farmhouse ... full of open-source pigs, which are now almost indistinguishable from the proprietary humans they recently overthrew" as John Metcalf aptly noted in his paper If open-source software is so much cooler, why isn't Transmeta getting it "
   

• Can Linus Torvalds honestly look into the eyes of people who worked with him the first ten years of Linux kernel development ?  If we are talking about hundreds of Transmeta employees during several rounds of layoffs (Linus was the chief PR guy for Transmeta and shares the responsibility with high management) and those who did not get in "Linux Mayflower ship" and landed with plush positions the question is pretty much rhetoric. But the deeper underling question is "whether Linux technical achievements were worth the trouble?" Or enthusiasts that Linus led to a distant bright future were engaged in the activity similar to drawing a picture on wet seashore sand with waves in a form of  new corporate requirements erasing all traces of their hard work. Ironically, in an open source development noted for its long hours, and many developers who create products "for fun" have become "open source slaves": the most visible victims of extreme overload. Still one thing is to do hard work for a lasting technical contribution and another for a temporary "dirty code mass" designed to the enrichment of "Linux aristocracy" and the top management of some sleazy companies which in some cases are just "10*7 open source sweetshops".  BTW it was FreeBSD development team that made the most important technical advances and managed to remain competitive with Linux using a tiny fraction of the resources. In 1999 they added an elegant partitioning facility to FreeBSD called jail. Jail offers "light weight virtual machines" isolating parts of  the file system, process tree, and networking namespaces, and removes all super-user privileges for objects outside the jail. In a Web-hosting environment, it provides 90% of functionality of a full partitioning solution such as VMware with much lower overhead and performance impact. This virtualization idea is one of major ideas that were overlooked by Linus Torvalds during the kernel development. In sense that was "technical knockdown" for Linus as the kernel architect. The second completely overlooked area is the role of scripting languages. Here Linux is a dinosaur that does not have it's own universal macrolanguage and as such is much more backward OS then OS/2(REXX) or Microsoft Windows (VBA). BASH that is a dominant shell in Linux is not used as application macro language.  Partially due to absence of built-in scripting language with decent text parsing capabilities Linux inherited Unix "configuration file mess' with multiple incompatible formats of the files maintained by each application without common framework.

• Who and why may drive Linux development in, say, 2021 after the IPO money are gone - after the plight of Linux is a 30 years old, boring last century story and the superhero author of the kernel become just another retired multimillionaire with his own yacht (it looks like Linus programming career ended sooner than that: AFAIK in 2005 Linus does not do much kernel programming anymore -- nnb). And when remaining developers are no longer motivated by the ability to participate in the refining of the kernel architecture belonging to the previous century and as such Linux in general and kernel development in particular no longer represents a fancy idea able to attract both technical talent and greedy PR savvy adventurists typical for Linux gold rush that produced such interesting and controversial figures as Red Hat founders Bob Young and Marc Ewing with their shadowy financers (Frank Batten, William Kaiser, Greylock IX Limited Partnership and Benchmark Capital);  "Kings of Linux hype", Slashdot  founders Rob Malda and Jeff Bates  (CmdrTaco and Hemos) , VA Linux honcho Larry "make money fast and run" Augustine,  "Linux microsoftizer-in-chef" Miguel de Icaza (of Midnight Commander, Gnome and Mono fame), evangelists Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and many others. Will the "top-guns" be satisfied with the role of  prisoners of the "Linux jail"  unable to cashout on the scale Linus himself  managed "to milk IPO cow"? The answer seems to be non-trivial and pretty unexpected.
  
  A related question is "Will Linus be forced out of kernel development or he'll step down on his own ?" As we will see approximately from year 2000 Linux became much larger then Linus and Linus role in centralizing kernel development gradually started to mutate from an asset to a liability. It's a classic Greek-tragedy theme: the qualities that are instrumental for "software superheroes" to reach the top then turn into liabilities and logically lead to their self-destruction. One of the facets of this problem is that "software superheroes" who start important projects that survive and prosper are usually very difficult to work with. In addition to significant software development talent they are often opinionated, judgmental, stubborn workaholics. And that's why they get to the top and why their projects are successful despite all odds. But once on the top the rules of the game instantly change. Most smart recognize their weaknesses and the "writing on the wall" and after surrounding themselves with more or less talented followers, who can continue the development independently, simply step down. Others assume that no one can possibly be as talented as they are. They are usually forced out.
   
• How essential to the open exchange of knowledge is the notion that none of the participants  are getting rich off the exchange? In other words does existence of companies like Red Hat corrupts the whole open source community and to what extent "commercial open source" can coexist with free exchange of knowledge needed for the healthy academic ecosystem. When you become a scientist, you implicitly give up the quest for great wealth. You get a decent wage, but as long as you belong to academia you cannot capitalize on your discoveries - you give them away. You publish, and reveal everything as the participant of the quest for knowledge, not the quest for money. You don't get a penny from the journals, either. If you do not like this, you can leave academia any time to pursue commercialization of your discoveries. This distinction does not hold for open source. And that might explain why Linus Torvalds never published any description of the internals of the kernel. As any programmer knows just source is not enough for any complex program.  The growth of complexity required for commercialization ruined the original beauty of Linux and in this sense the history on Linux ended with version 1.x branch and that is true in many other dimensions, including Linus Torvalds role as a visionary who demonstrated the Unix kernel can be reimplemented in a short period of time by a single person. After that the bloat made the fact that the source of the kernel is available much less relevant.
   
• Is there a hidden "Animal Farm" theme in all those newly minted Linux millionaires ? Linus participation in Linux IPO craze and the process of conversion of a poor Finnish researcher into newly minted millionaire presents an interesting illustration of why  "Ye cannot serve God and mammon".  To a certain extent Linux became a flagship of commercial exploitation of open source --  commercial companies are using the potential of open source communities as cheap subcontractors for their projects using "Linux golden boys" few highly paid top developers. "Cut-throat competition. Balkanization. Trade secrets. Sharing? Forget it. Remind you of corporate America? Nope." It's all about "open source" companies. I would say several open-source communities today essentially became subcontractors of  certain American multinationals and pawns in a fight for market share and profits of respective multinationals.  Company like Red Hat and IBM very quickly realized that you just need to pay a nice salary to few key people and you can completely control the direction of the development as if it is in-house development. If Linux kernel needs features that are necessary for successful running of Oracle or Webshere they will soon magically appear in the next release of the kernel. 
   
• What are connections between Linux and outsourcing?  Appearance of $15 job offers is deeply disturbing and here connection with Linux and cheap volunteer labor looks especially suspicious. Stallman once wanted the programmers work in McDonalds. It looks like his dream might come true. It's one thing when volunteers try to help their colleagues in academy, it's completely another when they try to displace companies and programmers that are working in those companies. Even so, the $15  per hour wages does make one wonder if guest worker visas and the rise of offshoring are undermining U.S. tech careers--and by extension threatening the US   tech leadership. Was IBM's Linux stance related to the effort to boost offshore support for enterprise users of Linux in the USA? This mixture of commercialization and outsourcing presented some non-trivial moral problems and challenges to Linus Torvalds (who actually personally participated in some layoffs in Transmeta) in view of his immigration to the USA, not to some South-East Asian country.
   
• We also will try to answer some unpleasant questions about the irony of the Linux development. When in 1991, Linus Torvalds created a tiny OS, a nameless prototype that later in 1994 became Linux version 0.99. This was really an achievement, as the OS was both tiny and capable. Ironically despite subsequent multimillion investments from this point it went downhill with each version becoming more bloated and the fact that it is available in source code less relevant. It ten years it became close to its commercial counterparts  in the level of bloat and that can compete with such OSes as Solaris and Microsoft Windows mainly due to lower price (zero in case of Debian, close to Microsoft in case of Red Hat and Suse). In essence Linus Torvalds can be credited for communization of OS design and converting OS kernel new "super BIOS".
  
  The initial version of Linux was the act of rebellion against the commercial software and hardware giants who were raking in millions of dollars a year from their closely protected operating systems and hardware. Who would have thought that, less then one decade later, the same giants he sought to undermine would give him (via Linux startups they financed)  stock options and he embraces this opportunity to became rich with the passion Don Juan would have envied. That he will peddle the stock of one of the most closed and secretive chip developers. And that IBM, a pretty controversial technical giant, the company that was hated in 80th much more than Microsoft ever was, will become the godfather of Linux and set  up a billion dollars fund to grow its (partially outsourced) technical consultant business.  Who would ever think that Linux would simultaneously become a symbol of both "brain drain" from Europe and the symbol of programming and support jobs outsourcing  to South-East Asia and other regions with highly qualified but very low paid IT community ?

To reach the goals stated above we will try to reconstruct actual sequence of events that have major influence on the development of Linux during the first ten, most formative years. Some of them are well known, other are not. The role of Microsoft, MINIX community, commercial firms like DEC,  Linux distributors, Transmeta and several large corporations (especially IBM and Intel) in the development of Linux is also outlined. I tried to verify all information that is included in this chapter, but of course it is far from perfect.  If you find mistakes in the facts presented, please let me know.

I will also try to address several popular fairy tails. First of all the fairy tail that Linux became prominent OS because of technical merits. Nothing can be father from that. From the very beginning Linux kernel was pretty reactionary in a technical sense with severe compromises necessary to achieve high speed on Intel architecture. My impression is that like in case of Microsoft OSes technical merits played secondary role: the initial Linux success was essentially a stepchild of AT&T lawsuit  that was filed in early 1992 (note perfect timing, usable version of Linux was available in April 1992 too).

Microsoft withdrawal from Unix development  in late 80-s also was of crucial importance: it was XENIX which resolved all prinsipal problems of Unix implementation of PC, for its time it was one of the most complete Unix environment available and with its almost 10 year head time in no way Linux could compete with XENIX penetration in PC marketplace  during Microsoft short-lived love affar with Unix (before Linux, Microsoft XENIX was the most capable and that the most PC-friendly Unix). In a sense Linux is an attempt to create old (Microsoft-owned) XENIX replacement for PC.

If not the lawsuit, it is quite probable that FreeBSD could have been dominating the free software world. While BSD sources were "under house arrest" (a settlement was finally reached only in January 1994) Linux filled the vacuum.  Many talented developers wanted to use a free Unix clone on newly minted 386-based PCs and, since BSD was in trouble, they helped to develop Linux.

From the beginning Linux was technically weak but extremely PC friendly and fairly quick Unix-compatible OS (Linus was a king of premature optimization) ; in early versions it actually wasn't real Unix, but eventually after several complete rewrites of the kernel it became more-or-less POSIX compatible (in a sense each new version of Linux was a new OS, for example Linux 1.x kernel is very different from Linux 2.x kernel).  Another important factor in Linux success was an attractive GPL licensing (and in early 90th GPL was viewed by technical community much more favorably than ten years later, see  BSD vs GPL for additional details). Moreover initial Linux can be installed on 386sx with just 2M of memory: a dominant configuration for PCs at this time. And I would like  to stress it again it was reasonably fast.

Another very popular fairytale is that Linus Torvalds was a volunteer -- this might be true only for the first two years of development. The development of Linux kernel quickly switched to the model of "sponsored software" development. The first sponsor was University of Helsinki which gave Linus semi-official possibility to develop kernel in working hours. Later he got non-disclosed Transmeta salary and stock options (association with Linus was a bad move for Transmeta that probably prevented potentially fruitful partnership with VMware, but it did ensured a successful IPO). Crazy Linux IPO gold rush remunerated Linus quite nicely, probably on the level very few leading commercial Unix developers enjoy: in just three years after arriving in California Linus Torvalds became a multimillionaire. I would say that since 1999 Linus Torvalds was probably the most highly paid developer in the Unix world. So much for a volunteer fairy tail.

This chapter also offers support for the hypothesis that Linux startups never operated in true market. It's some kind of artificial market as artificial as the existence of Red Hat after 2000. For those that eventually manage to get to IPO (Red Hat, VA Linux, Caldera) from the beginning it  was as close to the typical "Internet bubble" financial scam as one can get. Most startups that survived the burst of Internet bubble were essentially front-ends of bigger companies (Red Hat and Suse are two examples).

Yet another fairytale (that actually is a part of "Raymondism") is that Linus invented new software development model: a  democratic (bazaar) distributed development. Actually Linus operated and operates like a dictator and rules the development of the kernel with an iron fist, especially since version 2.0. What was really new is that along with technical talent Linus Torvalds proved to be a brilliant PR person who played a significant role in Linux gold rush (Red Hat and VA Linux IPOs) and in the controversial success of the Transmeta IPO. I would argue that the real role of Linus Torvalds in Transmeta (up to the IPO) had a significant (or may be even primary) marketing load. 

Another popular myth is the Linus was invented Linux -- actually at the beginning Linux was a pretty straightforward reengineering project. Technically it was interesting until version 1.x when it was both tiny and capable OS. After that in no way Linux kernel can be considered a technical achievement in a way the original Unix kernel and Unix environment were. Yes it was and is an important social achievement, but technically speaking Linux is a pretty boring, conservative reimplementation of Unix. Moreover, during the first ten years of development covered in this chapter Linux definitely failed to surpass in quality FreeBSD that used for development a tiny fraction of resources in comparison with Linux. Some kernel subsystems remained inferior to FreeBSD up to 2002 (the end of the period covered in the chapter). It's also important to understand that Linux, while an exciting example of collaborative Internet-based development of a Unix clone, doesn't really have a design. It's a software development project based on a 'reference model'.

I would argue that with all its great democratic social value, technically Linux looks more like neo-conservative revolution similar to Newt Gingrich "Contract with America" thing (fight corruption, waste in government spending, tax reform and a balanced budget, etc.), largely directed against Microsoft. It's difficult to see Linux as a technological advance. True innovators explore ideas that will render something obsolete – as automobiles made livery stables obsolete. I think that scripting languages like Perl, Python and TCL are the only real and significant innovation that can be attributed to open source movement. At the same time classic monolithic kernel that Linux is based upon are CS orthodoxy and are much less innovative than, say, Plan 9 or Be OS, or even Amiga. The most innovative things in Unix space for the last 10 years were domain of commercial developers (Sun's RPC, proc filesystem, Pluggable authentication modules (PAM), NFS, Trusted Solaris RBAC implementation,  Solaris on the fly updates, AIX Volume manager, to name a few) as well as research institutions (Kerberos, Amoeba, Plan 9, etc. ).  Linux record in innovation looks extremely unconvincing for such a mature stage of development (over 10 years).

This orthodoxy -- the fundamental resistance to anything non-traditional makes Linux success really a neo-conservative type of success. You can consider Linux to be a new super BIOS for PC and that in this role the conservatism is of  paramount importance. Although it serves as an democratic alternative to Microsoft, Linux in its own turn inhibits grows of alternative OSes, contributing to the lack of diversity, and ultimately lack of innovation that are so characteristic for present stage of software engineering. For example OS/2 has a very neat idea of using the same scripting language both as a shell and as a macrolanguage as well as the idea of user-defined (extended) attributes in the filesystems.  Both Amiga and BeOS contained innovative features (for example, it was Amiga which introduced REXX as an OS shell),  Nothing similar can be said about Linux. Neither Linux kernel  not any distribution were able to introduce any innovations worth mentioning. All Linus Torvalds was concerned was the speed of running on Intel hardware and as Knuth aptly observed "premature optimization is the root of all evil."  That's essentially the tragedy of Linus life: he have spend way too much time on premature optimization. From this point of view the success of Linux is a manifestation of a deep crisis in system engineering as Bob Pike noted in his paper. It's a definite sign that computer science is coming into its middle age and is experiencing "middle age crisis".

Paradoxically all this makes Linux and Microsoft OSes really close relatives. Linux actually had become a Microsoft of Unix world. Inferior in many respects to alternatives, plagued with design problems but still highly successful.  Not unlike humans war, the Linux-Microsoft fight has resulted mostly in collateral damage to commercial Unixes despite the fact that there are more technically interesting commercial Unix and Unix-like alternatives to Windows than Linux including BeOS and Mac OS X. Instead of wiping out Windows, Linux helped Microsoft to drive commercial Unixes out of the entry level server business as Sun can attest.

Contrary to popular press claims Linux wasn't the first open source OS, nor is it the only one that's caught the Internet wave: Linux was late to the table and included  TCP/IP stack into OS only after 1995 (before that it was a separate package supported by .  Many enthusiastically biased papers and books about Linux kernel claim that  Linux has a high standard for source code quality. In what version and compared to what?  Even in v. 2.4 (a rework of the kernel stimulated by Mindcraft fiasco) several subsystems are still pretty raw and ugly. In reality the first ten years it was definitely weaker in quality of programming that other contenders, for example weaker then any member of BSD family( FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). And it is not accidental that despite all Linux PR a lot of real work on Internet is done by BSD servers, even though the general public has less awareness of them. For example few people know that Yahoo has been relying on FreeBSD since 1995, and according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo they might never succeed if they use the other OS. They would definitely fail with Linux as running an OS that is in constant beta is an extremely challenging even for established players to say nothing about startups.

All-in-all despite Linus claims to the contrary, Linux was more the success of a political movement (anti-Microsoft coalition) and because of commercial distributors marketing than it was a technical success. In this sense Linux is a continuation of the democratic processes that was started by Microsoft and IBM in PC. Actually in more then one aspect Linux success is very similar to the success of Microsoft software: Microsoft success was also partially based on very strong anti-IBM feelings, and like Linux Ms-DOS and Windows were the result of democratization of the software and hardware development that was achieved by personal computer revolution.  Like Microsoft helped people to escape from the tyranny of "Sysadmin controlled environment" that existed both on mainframes and large Unix servers (actually in late 80th Microsoft owned the first Unix and extremely influential PC-based version of it called XENIX),  Linux, in its turn, helps in diminishing or in some cases even elimination of the "Microsoft operating system tax", especially Microsoft server tax. Like Microsoft OSes the main advantage of Linux was and is that it is the most PC-friendly Unix.  In this sense Linux is a true successor of Microsoft Xenix.  This PC-friendliness along with tremendous increase in power and sophistication of PC hardware platform was important driving force behind Linux success.  

As for fighting Microsoft the dents that Linux managed to inflict are almost unnoticeable to the naked eye. On the contrary it can be argued that Linux has a symbiotic relationship with Microsoft and that it revitalized Microsoft and prevented Microsoft stagnation in the operating systems market.  Linux hasn't done anything to make PCs more attractive, more powerful, or easier to use. To the extent that there is innovation there, it has come from other companies. All of Linux's contributions have been in providing other companies' technical innovations to a wider audience at lower (zero) cost. It's a big win-win situation for consumers and I think that one of the main achievement of Linux as a social movement is stimulation of improvements in Microsoft operating systems and software and to a lesser extent in major commercial Unixes  (Solaris 10 and AIX 5.3).

At the same time commercial open source (Red Hat model) represented an interesting outsourcing strategy with volunteers as zero cost workers (or low cost workers, if they are converted to salaried employers in Europe or third-world countries): they produce code, we sell it.  And instead of  Stallman's private charity it is companies like Red Hat, IBM, HP, VA Software, etc which are benefiting from this implicit outsourcing.  On the other side of political spectrum Red Flag Linux was adopted by (formally communist, although the question is pretty complex) Chinese authorities. 

Fortunately all those events did not place Linus at the center of the firestorm that has erupted in the United States over the globalization of white-collar jobs. But it's not completely improbable that Linus might succeed were Stallman failed and managed to produce an offspring of two dangerous demons (high speed Internet and cheap powerful PCs) to impoverish God-blessed American programmers including many who like him previously moved to the USA from other countries.  That might help USA's educational system, but unfortunately, the only time displaced programmers think of becoming teachers is when after they got pink slips, there is no McDonalds or gas station nearby ;-). 
 

The life at a glance

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell

Linux is now a trademark of Linus Torvalds
in the US and some other countries.

Prehistory

1969 - Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland.

Minix period (1988-1991)

The beginning of Linux development (1991-1992)
Hermit-like work during early kernel releases

Successful Fight with FreeBSD (1993-1997)

1996

1997

• 1996. Linus' first daughter was born. Minor disruptions of kernel development. It's the first time many developers  have openly complained of the Linus source control system (ie, submit patches into the black hole names Linus). 
• 1997 Linus Torvalds Receives 1997 Nokia Foundation Award
• May 1997. Caldera ships OpenLinux Standard 1.1 solidifying its hold of enterprise Linux market.
• April 1997. Suse opens California branch.
• June 1997. Maximum RPM book was published, RPM became standard way to package Linux distributions and that's undermine Caldera. Red-Hat based RPM-based distributions (Suse and Mandrake) became popular and put additional pressure on Caldera
   
• March 1997. Linus Torvalds receives Lifetime Achievement Award at Uniforum
  • Pictures
• 1997. Linux meets Microsoft: end of the Finland period and of the academic career (1988-1997 -- he spent 10 years as a student and researcher at the University of Helsinki, coordinating development of  the kernel since 1992). Now he decided to become rich and moved to the Bay Area (Santa Clara) to work for Transmeta (Microsoft's Paul Allen  is one of major investors).
• June 1997. Eric S. Raymond presents his paper ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar''.

The Burden of Fame (1998). Is Linus Stalled?

Summary: Microsoft was partially paralyzed by the battle with the Department of Justice and cannot retaliate against defectors from the Windows NT camp. Halloween memo was leaked to the Web. Intel invested in Red Hat. Number of staff developers in Red Hat was grown to over twenty. Major database vendors ported product to Linux. Corel ported Word Perfect. Shipments of Linus servers surged by 212%, a growth rate that outpaced all others in the server market. Linus became a media darling, and  enjoyed his minutes of fame. Gave more interviews in one year that for the rest of his life; 

• Jan. Netscape understand that Microsoft eat its lunch and declares its intent to release the source code for its Navigator browser
• April the birth of Linus' second daughter causes substantial disruption in kernel development as many patches get lost. Some grumbling results as it becomes clear just how dependent the entire process is on Linus' continual presence. 
• April. Netscape source code is released, and initial fixes and enhancements begin arriving within hours.

  Eric Raymond attacks FSF and launched an open source marketing campaign. Raymodism became a more moderate, reform branch of open source religion and splits from Stallmanism. Salon Magazine interviews Eric Raymond after Netscape's announcement to open their source code. Some interesting quotes:

  • A self-described neo-pagan libertarian who enjoys shooting semi-automatic weapons, Raymond fits the classic stereotype of the hacker almost too well. Hackers tend to think they know better; free software libertarian hackers tend to think they know best of all. As Raymond told me with pride: "I'm an arrogant son of a bitch."
    
  • I notice that you no longer prefer to use the term "free software." Instead, you say "open source." Can you explain? Sure. [After meeting with Netscape] I got together with a bunch of free software hackers and we had our own strategy conference. The issue on the table was how to exploit the Netscape breakthrough. We worked out some strategies and tactics. First conclusion: The name "free software" has to go. The problem is nobody knows what "free" means, and to the extent that they do think they know, it's tied in with a whole bunch of ideology and that crazy guy from Boston, Richard Stallman.
• June. FREENIX, the Freely Redistributable Software Track of the USENIX Technical Conference is devoted to developers and users of open source software.
• July. Debian 2.0 is released by more that 300 volunteer developers working on more than 1,500 packages.
• August. On Aug 10: Linus Torvalds  appears on the front cover of Forbes Magazine.

   

• September: The Microsoft "Halloween Documents", internal corporate memos, are leaked to the public. In October they provoked  big discussion about the future of Linux and about arrogant commentaries to memos posted by Eric Raymond. The term Raymondism was born. A parody on Eric's early paper  The Circus Midget and the Fossilized Dinosaur Turd was created. 
• October: Linus again drops too many patches. Linus took a vacation. Version 2.2 slipped into 1999. see also LWN 1998 Linux timeline
• Intel and Netscape invest in Red Hat.
•  
• November 1998. FreeBSD 3.0 released.

1999: The Linux IPO Gold Rush, and the Raise of Dominance of the Red Hat

The UNIX system reaches its 30th anniversary. The Open Group and the IEEE commence joint development of a revision to POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. First LinuxWorld conference.  Mac OS X Server Released at about the same time as Darwin, Mac OS X Server was a sort of preview version of Mac OS X designed specifically for file servers. Tru64 UNIX ships.

January 1999.  Version 2.2 of the kernel released despite bugs -- Linus probably needed to respond to the announcement of the FreeBSD 3.0 ;-)

February 1999. 

• IBM invested in Red Hat and several other distributors. Caldera instantly became a second rate Linux distributor for enterprise customers.
• Open source as a profit center for publishers. Red Herring Magazine features an article on freeware discussing the emerging OpenSource business model. In it Tim O'Reilly stated: 

  "The greatest opportunity for an open-source software business model may come from even less direct plays -- companies that specialize in essential accessories like manuals stand to gain substantial profits from the demand for open-source software materials. O'Reilly & Associates, the leading publisher of technical resource books, has sold more than $94 million in open-source-related materials since it was founded, most of that since 1997."

March 1999.

• Red Hat domination confirmed. Novell invested in Red Hat and not in Caldera with which it has strong historic ties. That was a confirmation of RH dominant status among Linux distributors. 
• Start of VA Linux IPO scam: VA Research buys the Linux.com domain for $1,000,000 and announces plans to turn it into a Linux portal. Later it will the record of the "Linux gold rush" getting the biggest initial day share rise in the history of the NASDAQ (from $30 to $320). Later this will be investigated by SEC.
• Al Gore revealed that "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet."  which became a popular joke, but politically is close to truth as Al Gore really contributed a lot of political support to Internet projects on the early, most vital stages. 

August 1999.

• Sun acquires StarDivision; it announces plans to release StarOffice under the Sun Community Source License and to make a web-enabled version of the office suite.
• Semiofficial end of the Linux history as a volunteer-based project: Red Hat managed to pull the first "Linux gold rush" IPO. A couple of people became paper billonaries.  Linus got his first block of shares, sold them and bought a house. Now he became a millionaire too, so his dream of getting rich after moving to USA came true. Now there is a multibillion commercial structure to care about Linux and profit from the effort of volunteer developers. Key people in the Linux camp became rich, some very rich ;-). Other enthusiasts will increasingly find themselves either "incorporated" or seduced by the commercial rush to capitalize financially on the Linux trend. Enormous emotional effort that so many volunteers put into developing Linux is probably over and most volunteers already ended in full time staff or executive positions in various Linux-related companies.
• It's now official -- Linux turned into corporate supported, corporate funded and corporate developed OS.

October 1999

• Sun Microsystems announces that it will release the source to Solaris under the Sun Community Source License.

November 1999

•  Red Hat announced its acquisition of Cygnus Solutions for almost $700 million in stock. Rumors of other acquisitions by Red Hat begin to circulate.

December 1999

• VA Linux Systems goes public after two repricings (originally priced at $11-$13/share). The final IPO price is $30/share; that price rises immediately to $300 before closing around $250. It sets the record for the biggest IPO rise in the history of the NASDAQ.``Gee. Remember when the big question was ‘How do we make money at this?'''--Eric Raymond

January 2000

• VA Linux Systems announces SourceForge (although the site had actually been up and running since November 1999). SourceForge also makes the code for its operation available under the GPL. By the end of the year, SourceForge hosted over 12,000 projects and 92,000 registered developers.
   
• Version 1.0 of Red Flag Linux is released in the People's Republic of China.
   
• Transmeta breaks its long silence and tells the world about the Crusoe chip

February 2000

• VA Linux Systems acqured Andover.net, the owner of the popular web sites Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.net.
• ??? Mac OS X Public Beta was released in 2000 for anybody willing to pay the $20 fee to test it out and report bugs and feature requests to Apple.
   

March 2000

• A new version of LILO is posted that is able to get past the 1024-cylinder boot limit that has plagued PC systems for years.
• Caldera Systems goes public after a short delay, on March 21. The stock, was offered at $14/share, began trading at $26 and closed at $29.44. "Caldera knows of no company that has built a profitable business based in whole or in part on open-source software.''--Caldera SEC filing
   
• Walnut Creek (the parent company for Slackware) and BSDi announce their merger. Yahoo! will be taking an equity investment in the new company.
   
• The Embedded Linux Consortium is announced.
   

April 2000

• Andy Tanenbaum releases the the Minix operating system under the BSD license.

May 2000

• SuSE releases the first supported Linux distribution for the IBM S/390 mainframe. Approximately 140 distribution companies exist across the globe.

June 2000

• Commercial considerations help prompt the relicensing of MySQL under the GPL. Progress Software forms a new company, NuSphere, just for the purpose of supporting MySQL.

July 2000

• Sun announces that StarOffice is to be released under the GPL.
   
• Oracle's Linux-based internet appliance fiasko. The ``New Internet Computer'' (NIC) is the latest result of Larry Ellison's long personal crusade against Microsoft systems and another flop. It was aimed at people who only want access to the Net; as such, it's essentially a $199 (without monitor) X terminal.
   
• Reports first appear that SCO may be purchased by Caldera. Later in 2000 Caldera and SCO announce their intent for Caldera International to be formed from Caldera's existing operation and two of SCO's three divisions.
   
• Ted Ts'o steps forward to become the new 2.4 status list maintainer. Alan Cox was doing the job until he said that it was time to ``find someone else to maintain it''. Ted Ts'o responded to Linus' subsequent call for a new status list maintainer.

August 2000

• HP, Intel, IBM and NEC announce the ``Open Source Development Lab'', which makes large hardware available to Linux developers for benchmarking and testing.

September 2000

• The RSA patent expires, allowing for secure web transactions without proprietary software.
   
• Trolltech releases the Qt library under the GPL, putting a definitive end to a FSF's long-running and unpleasant license flame war.

December 2000

• IBM announces plans to invest $1 billion in Linux-based outsourcing in 2001.

January 2001

• The long-awaited 2.4.0 kernel was released on January 4.
• The US National Security Agency (NSA) releases SELinux under the GPL. Like Trusted Solaris, SELinux offers role based security in addition to the standard UNIX-like permissions system.

March 2001

• Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001. It incorporated a lot of the feedback provided by people that tried out Mac OS X Public Beta.
• The Linux 2.5 kernel summit is held in San Jose, California

April 2001

• IBM launches ``Peace, Love and Linux'' graffiti campaign in several cities.
   

June 2001

• VA Linux Systems exits the hardware business, choosing to focus on SourceForge instead. Later VA drops the word ``Linux'' from its name altogether, relaunching itself as VA Software Corporation.
   

Last modified: August 27, 2008