As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything less than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the HURD kernel. This initial unwillingness to see Linux in political terms would represent a major blow to the Free Software Foundation.
As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain.
“I may not have seen the light”, writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman’s 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. “But I guess something from his speech sunk in”.[20]
Chapter 10. GNU/Linux
By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker culture. Wired magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer, once a hobbyist’s toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free software operating system, curious users could still try Linux in the interim.
Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream society. People were getting it.
Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was saying all the right things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, whitehouse.gov, but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet’s Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time.
Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself. Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux’ high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn’t know what to make of it. More compilation album than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project’s newly developed C Library) to X (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch’s capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, “good artists borrow; great artists steal”. Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do”.[1]
Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds’ part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn’t built an operating system out of a desire to give his fellow hackers something to work with; he’d built it to have something he himself could play with. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence, Torvalds’ genius lay less in the overall vision and more in his ability to recruit other hackers to speed the process.
That Torvalds and his recruits had succeeded where others had not raised its own troubling question: what, exactly, was Linux? Was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by Stallman in the GNU Manifesto? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own home system?
By late 1993, a growing number of Linux users had begun to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the Linux theme. They even became bold enough to bottle and sell their variations-or “distributions”-to fellow Unix aficionados. The results were spotty at best.
“This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions”, remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University. “You’d flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads proclaiming `Linux.’ Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own source code into the mix”.
Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being “swept away” by Linux when he first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. “It was just a lot of fun”, he says. “It made me want to get involved”. The explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best way to get involved was to build a version of Linux free of additives, Murdock set about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the intention of folding them into his own distribution. “I wanted something that would live up to the Linux name”, Murdock says.
In a bid to “stir up some interest”, Murdock posted his intentions on the Internet, including Usenet’s comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu. As a hacker, Murdock instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as “the hacker of hackers”. Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about Murdock’s gripes over Linux?
Murdock opened the message.
“He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux system, too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy”.
The message represented a dramatic about-face on Stallman’s part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of the Linux community’s affairs. In fact, he had all but shunned the renegade operating system when it first appeared on the Unix programming landscape in 1991. After receiving the first notification of a Unix-like operating system that ran on PCs, Stallman says he delegated the task of examining the new operating system to a friend. Recalls Stallman, “He reported back that the software was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn’t portable”.
20.
See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond,
1.
Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote’s most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (May, 1997).
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html