With a 61% market share of the global servers market, and running 75% of stock exchanges worldwide, the Linux operating system today powers the servers that delivers Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay and Google. Linus Benedict Torvalds, the Helsinki-Born creator of the OS, speaks out his mind on the merits of open source, open collaboration software systems
Q: In 1991 you were a student at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. What got you thinking about creating a new Operating System?
Linus Torvalds (LT): It wasn’t really a conscious decision; it was more a confluence of factors. Part of it was simply that I was interested in Operating Systems and had been working on low-level issues for a long time. I’d been doing assembly language programming and messing around with device drivers with my previous machine – a Sinclair QL that had very little support in Finland. So although I was only 21, I had something of a background for it. Another thing was that I wanted to run Unix on my newly-acquired PC, so rather than running DOS and Windows, I had gotten Minix for my machine, which was a small Unix-like OS built for educational purposes. But it was much more limited than the Unix I had gotten used to at university. At the same time, I was working on a ‘pet project’ to teach myself all about the innards of my new machine. This is what ended up expanding to become the first version of Linux.
Q: Linux doesn’t seem to have an ideology – or does it?
LT: Linux doesn’t have an ideology, no, and I don’t think it should. The important part of the question is the word ‘an’; I do think there can be many ideologies: I do it for my own reasons, other people do it for their own reasons. It’s really refreshing to see people working on Linux because they believe they can make the world a better place by spreading technology and making it available to people more widely. That’s one ideology, and I think it’s a great one. It isn’t really why I started Linux myself, but it warms my heart to see it used that way. But I also think it’s great to see all the commercial companies that use open source simply because it’s good for business. That’s a totally different ideology, and I think it’s a perfectly good one, too. The only ideology I really despise is the kind that is about exclusion of other ideologies. That’s just small minded and stupid. So the important part about open source is not the ideology – it’s just that everybody can use it for their needs and reasons.
Q: Before long, you began to encourage input to your system’s coding from other members of the IT community. Given how hard you worked on it, how did feel about the ‘loss of control’?
LT: To me, inviting other people to become part of the project wasn’t about me losing control; it was about getting lots of new ideas for further improvements. I would almost certainly have become bored with Linux rather quickly if it hadn’t been for this decision – that’s what had happened with the earlier projects I worked on in private. In fact, the initial impetus for making the Linux source code available publicly was not because I wanted others to help me write it – it was because I was proud of what I had done and wanted feedback on where to go next. The early interactions were less about other people writing code, and more about asking others what they thought the project needed, and then me writing the code myself. When people started actually sending me suggested code changes, that became a very natural extension of it.
Q: In 1991 you were a student at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. What got you thinking about creating a new Operating System?
Linus Torvalds (LT): It wasn’t really a conscious decision; it was more a confluence of factors. Part of it was simply that I was interested in Operating Systems and had been working on low-level issues for a long time. I’d been doing assembly language programming and messing around with device drivers with my previous machine – a Sinclair QL that had very little support in Finland. So although I was only 21, I had something of a background for it. Another thing was that I wanted to run Unix on my newly-acquired PC, so rather than running DOS and Windows, I had gotten Minix for my machine, which was a small Unix-like OS built for educational purposes. But it was much more limited than the Unix I had gotten used to at university. At the same time, I was working on a ‘pet project’ to teach myself all about the innards of my new machine. This is what ended up expanding to become the first version of Linux.
Q: Linux doesn’t seem to have an ideology – or does it?
LT: Linux doesn’t have an ideology, no, and I don’t think it should. The important part of the question is the word ‘an’; I do think there can be many ideologies: I do it for my own reasons, other people do it for their own reasons. It’s really refreshing to see people working on Linux because they believe they can make the world a better place by spreading technology and making it available to people more widely. That’s one ideology, and I think it’s a great one. It isn’t really why I started Linux myself, but it warms my heart to see it used that way. But I also think it’s great to see all the commercial companies that use open source simply because it’s good for business. That’s a totally different ideology, and I think it’s a perfectly good one, too. The only ideology I really despise is the kind that is about exclusion of other ideologies. That’s just small minded and stupid. So the important part about open source is not the ideology – it’s just that everybody can use it for their needs and reasons.
Q: Before long, you began to encourage input to your system’s coding from other members of the IT community. Given how hard you worked on it, how did feel about the ‘loss of control’?
LT: To me, inviting other people to become part of the project wasn’t about me losing control; it was about getting lots of new ideas for further improvements. I would almost certainly have become bored with Linux rather quickly if it hadn’t been for this decision – that’s what had happened with the earlier projects I worked on in private. In fact, the initial impetus for making the Linux source code available publicly was not because I wanted others to help me write it – it was because I was proud of what I had done and wanted feedback on where to go next. The early interactions were less about other people writing code, and more about asking others what they thought the project needed, and then me writing the code myself. When people started actually sending me suggested code changes, that became a very natural extension of it.
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