Reading 10: King of the Ball
The story of the success of Linux is incredible and relatively unprecedented. Going from a just for fun project of Linus to the most used operating system in the world is just about as successful as anything can be. That’s an amazing transformation and should be an inspiring story for anyone interested in coding and open source.
It’s proof of how influential a personal project can be, especially if you share it with others and try to engage with others through open source. The combined efforts of many are unsurprisingly more capable than the efforts of only one. Linux isn’t just a story of the success of a Finnish man named Linus, but it’s exhibit A of the potential of the open source model. If there’s a project compelling enough that a lot of hobbyists, professionals, and even corporations want to see succeed and grow for their own uses, then it has a pretty great chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, not every project and software is going to garner this kind of interest. But, ultimately, it does show the potential and power of the open source community under the best circumstances.
Certainly, the growth and development of Linux was not without its share of roadblocks and obstacles. Perhaps most notably, there was the saga of the Linux trademark. Attorney — and patent (trademark) troll — William Della Croce, Jr. registered the Linux trademark before Linus ever considered doing so in 1995. Then, he did as patent trolls do and tried to put pressure on various Linux distributors demanding some kind of compensation for the use of his trademark. Eventually, in 1997, various parts of the Linux community were able to band together to appeal the assignment of the trademark to Della Croce and the trademark was finally awarded to Linus Torvalds himself.
This type of problem arose to a large extent because Linus always has treated Linux more like just a coding project than any kind of business entity or product. Unlike some other major tech successes (e.g. Steve Jobs), Linus is really just concerned with the code. He cannot care to talk about or think about growing a business or making money. Steve Jobs even wanted him to team up and partner with Apple to really be more successful in the desktop market. In a pretty hilarious response to this, Linus just reacted with “Why should I care?” This is fairly abnormal for someone successful in tech. Bill Gates was certainly concerned about the product and crushing competition at every turn. Mark Zuckerberg has clearly shown a pattern of caring about ad revenue above pretty much all else. But, Linus is fairly unique in his priorities, which might be a weakness or a success depending on what you value.
Indisputably, Linux had a lot of things go right for it to get to the stage that it is now. It had to be lucky pretty often to grow to the extent it has today. However, that’s pretty much the case with all success stories. In order for anything or anyone to be extremely successful, there has to be a combination of some kind of talent and luck. So, while it may be difficult to imagine an open source success story as big as Linux in the future, just as it’s difficult to imagine tech companies founded now being able to eclipse the Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook of the world, I do think it’s certainly possible. More and more people are being exposed to coding as more and more people have access to the resources to do so. Also, some bigger companies like Microsoft are finally starting to really jump on board with open source. Therefore, the open source community should be getting bigger and more powerful every year. So, why can’t we have another Linux some day? I’m a believer in the power of the hackers in the bazaar have faith in the open source system, so I definitely believe in the possibility of another Linux some day.
