Reading 10: King of the Ball

Towards the early phase, Linus had a few interesting things to deal with regarding Linux. First, the Linux community had to deal with some Boston lawyer who trademarked the word Linux. Next, Linus had to deal with people from the Linux community who were incredibly worried about the future of Linux when Linus went to work for the commercial company Transmeta. To me, it seemed like Linus’ approach to dealing with these things are just standing in the back as much as you can and letting things play out until you have to get involved. I don’t think he really cared for the technical details of the lawsuit. Also, while he thinks others’ concerns regarding the future of Linux were valid, I don’t think he liked having to explain away to people that he and Linux would be fine when he worked at Transmeta because he thought they were overblown concerns. Ultimately, I think he did only the minimum of what he had to do to get things to stop annoying him.

Linus is a firm believer in a good night’s sleep. He thinks that working long hours and doing extra shifts like others in Silicon Valley do is silly and not as productive as good sleep. “You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep, oh, say ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you’re alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever” (148). Also, he had disagreements with Steve Jobs because he frankly just didn’t care about getting the desktop market like Jobs would think most people would. Additionally, Linus had disagreements with both Jobs and Joy regarding open source. Linus thought that both of their companies were taking an approach to open source which really wasn’t open source at all. He thought it was dumb that Jobs was pitching Mac OS X to emphasize Mach’s kernel being low level and open source because the Mac layer not being open source defeats the argument. Linus also thought that Sun Microsystems’ approach to open source was stupid because Jini involved licenses that you needed in order to make any modifications or make it part of your infrastructure.

I think Linux’s success is pretty cool. Linus didn’t start Linux with some big company, and he also didn’t really have money in mind when making it. All he really cared about was doing what he liked to do and satisfying his creative itch. The fact that it got so successful surely is proof of the power of hackers in the bazaar. The open source philosophy lets the whole world contribute to what’s there or build something new with it. I suppose Linux’s success was partly due to fortunate circumstances in the sense that Linus was able to create something that so many people would be interested in, but I hardly think that disproves the power of hackers in the bazaar. Some things will be popular and some may not be, but the ones that are popular are the ones that people will get excited about. When there are people excited, it’s inevitable that some will contribute, and the project will become that much better. I feel like the open source philosophy has only been growing, so it’s only a matter of time until the next big success story arrives. I don’t know if it will be as big as Linux, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.