LINUX Manifesto | reprinted in part from boot, July/August 1998 Many have fallen to the mighty Gates OS regime, but all hope is not lost. For out of the darkness and despair a new world leader has emerged--Linus Torvalds. And only with Linux--his revolutionary OS for the masses--will salvation, security, and succor ever be possible. But a one-man army can't win a war, and Torvalds needs your help to deliver his manifesto to the world. ------------------ THE LINUX MANIFESTO | part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | ------------------ "Some people think giving away the operating system for free is somehow tied to communism. These people think that Microsoft is a good company, because 'It must be good if the richest man on Earth owns it.'" boot: Let's discuss Linux's conception. How did it originate? Torvalds: It really came to be because of my own personal needs. I was a student and a very poor computer person. I knew I couldn't live with DOS and Windows. I wanted to run somebody else's operating system and be happy and not worry. But nobody else's operating system fit my needs. You either had the really low-end, DOS, or you had the really high-end--the real operating systems, such as Unix, which nobody used as personal operating systems. They were used in commercial settings in universities, in research institutions--big places. And big places don't care if they throw $10,000 out the window because that's peanuts to them. But to a poor student like me, it wasn't peanuts. So I got a teaching operating system, a small Unix-like thing that was meant to be a teaching aide of how operating systems worked. But it wasn't enough. When I was 21, I was very self-assured when it came to programming and not very self-assured when it came to anything else. But I knew I was the best programmer in the world. So I just decided "Hey, why couldn't I do this myself?" And so I did. boot: What were your needs at the time? Torvalds: DOS didn't fit that bill, and Windows still doesn't. When I do something I expect the computer to do what I tell it to do because that's how computers are supposed to work. But if you're running Windows, MacOS, or a lot of other nonsecure operating systems, you really can't depend on the machine because there are too many bugs that can bring down the system. And when there's too many things you can't depend on, you sit there nervously hoping it won't crash. I really hate not being able to trust the system. boot: And Linux is something you can trust? Torvalds: Ultimately, yes. But when I'm doing very active development-such as adding new features--I'm doing stuff that really makes my personal system untrustworthy. I know I'm not immune to bugs either; but at the same time when something goes wrong, I can at least trust that I can fix it. boot: Linux is based on Unix, right? Torvalds: Well it's based on Unix in the sense that I was used to Unix and really liked it. Unix has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something, some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows. It just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. boot: So what is it you hate about the Windows OS? Torvalds: What's fundamentally wrong is that nobody ever had any taste when they did it. Microsoft has been very much into making the user interface look good, but internally it's just a complete mess. And even people who program for Microsoft and who have had years of experience just don't know how it works internally. Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug. And Microsoft isn't interested in anyone fixing bugs-- they're interested in making money. They don't have anybody who takes pride in Windows 95 as an operating system. People inside Microsoft know it's a bad operating system, and they still continue working on it because they want to get the next version out because they want to have new features to sell more copies. The problem with this approach is that over time nobody understands it, nobody really fixes bugs other than when they're really obvious, and the end result is really messy. You can't trust it because under certain circumstances it just spontaneously reboots or just halts in the middle of something. Normally it works fine and then once in a blue moon for some completely unknown reason, it dies, and nobody knows why. Not Microsoft, not the experienced user, and certainly not the completely clueless user who probably sits there shivering, thinking "What did I do wrong?" That's what's really irritating to me. boot: Don't you think programmers at Microsoft are proud of their OS? Torvalds: I think there's a lot of programmers who aren't in it for the money primarily. They're probably programming because they really like programming and Microsoft pays them well. A lot of Microsoft programmers are really proud, but they aren't really proud of the OS itself. They're really proud of being part of something that's really successful. I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself. I just think that they make really crappy operating systems. boot: If they're so crappy, why don't people just say "Let's just use Linux"? Torvalds: A lot of Linux users are people who really need the stability and are ready to say, "Goodbye Windows. I can't take this crap anymore." But inertia keeps people with Windows because there's lots of good programs. Hardware manufacturers look at the market and say, "Since most of the market is Windows 95, should we spend a lot of money developing for Linux or for Windows NT?" Microsoft actually has problems getting drivers for NT. They've tried to make the interfaces between drivers to NT and 98 as similar as possible so that there would be less resistance, even though it has a fairly small percentage of the market. Some of that inertia may actually end up helping Linux too. Microsoft can't change all of its internals quickly because it has so many applications. But if an emulation library is good enough so you can run all the applications you really need on other platforms, Microsoft will quickly lose the advantage. People have tried this. Java is a good example of that. If the Windows application wasn't tied to Windows, but was a x86 bytecode, there's nothing stopping us from running Windows programs on Linux, Solaris, or anything else. Sun had WABI, a Windows emulation package, but it had some serious resource problems and was never good enough to become a big player. boot: Can emulators actually work? Will people start using Linux just to see if they do? Torvalds: I don't see that happening very quickly. WINE (the Linux emulator for Windows) works to a fairly surprising degree. You can run real Windows programs with it, but some of them don't look right, and some of them just crash. But it has been making big progress in the last year, and now you can actually run Word for Windows. It doesn't work for everybody and there are known bugs, but it's almost becoming usable. I doubt people will wake up and say, "Hey, let's get rid of the shackles of Microsoft and switch to Linux and WINE." But there are going to be more and more people who discover they really want the networking abilities of Linux, or who run a web server on it. WINE slowly expands the group of people who would find Linux or some other operating system acceptable because they really don't care about Microsoft per se; they care about a few programs. In a few years WINE will be good enough that you can actually consider running Linux instead of Windows. It won't take over 100% of the market, but that's OK, too, because when you don't have one major entity that owns most of the market, it's a much saner, competitive environment. I think that'll happen, regardless of Linux. boot: What happens if it doesn't happen? Torvalds: We'll see some real stagnation in what you can do with computers. Software companies are already scared of making products that are too good because Microsoft either starts to look at them, or buys them up. That scenario happens fairly often. The bad situation, which is equally likely, is Microsoft decides it won't spend money on buying this company because it can compete in the same market space. And then just by being this behemoth, it just rolls over this smaller company. It's kind of sad. This is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but many hardware and software companies are scared of Microsoft coming and taking their market away. Not by Microsoft being innovative, but by Microsoft just rolling over them. boot: Does Linux support multimedia better than Windows 95? Torvalds: Well, it depends on what you want to do. For games, there are a lot of developers who really have to jump through hoops to get anything done using DirectX. There are actually game developers, such as id Software, who prefer working on Linux and developing all their software on it. When the game is ready, they port it to Windows because that's obviously the larger market. For many multimedia applications you need A-1 reliability in timing. You care about the performance, but above all it should be smooth. You don't care about how many frames per second you can output; you care about the fact that you can output them at certain well-defined times. There's no point in trying to output 100 frames a second if all of them happen in the first half-second and the next half-second everything is still. And that's the kind of dependability that Microsoft has problems with. Also, when it comes to the really interesting stuff, performance is a major issue. A lot of multimedia is getting stuff off disk and onto the screen. In many cases Linux just performs a lot better. But there a lot of development tools under Microsoft that you don't have with Linux. There are multimedia environments for Linux too, but you don't have the same choices you have with Windows. boot: There's a perception out there that Linux is difficult to install. Torvalds: [interrupts] And it's completely wrong. But the perception comes from the fact that when you buy a PC, Windows is already installed for you. You don't actually see how nasty it is to install. Most people who want to use Linux are already used to Windows, and there's a small problem getting used to it. So, yes, when you install Linux you have to do it yourself, but at least you don't have to reinstall it every time something goes wrong. But there are political issues too. boot: Such as? Torvalds: Some people think this open-source thing and giving away the operating system for free somehow is tied to communism. These people think that Microsoft is a good company, not because they're making good products, but because "It must be good if the richest man on Earth owns it." These are people who don't look at anything except commercial success. I've actually gotten e-mail (not often, but occasionally) from people who say "Go home to Finland and don't take away these American jobs." But these people completely ignore the fact that capitalism is based on being able to compete in the marketplace. boot: If you were in charge of Microsoft's OS, what would be the first major change? Torvalds: I don't know what there is to do anymore. They really can't change Windows 95 or 98. Too many programs depend on it. They can't muck around with the big kernels. boot: Do you ever see a time where Microsoft might release an OS that doesn't have any legacy support for applications? Torvalds: No. They certainly probably want to, but at the same time they definitely don't want to open themselves up to the competition. boot: Do you have a Windows PC? Torvalds: No. I really don't need to. When somebody sends me e-mail in Word 5, I just reply to them and say "Please send this in readable format." Even though I could start-up Word for Windows I choose not to. Of course, there aren't that many people who actually send me Word files. The people I e-mail with tend to know better! [laughs] boot: Compared to the BeOS and the MacOS, which seem to garner a lot of publicity, Linux is a silent OS. Why do you think that is? Torvalds: It's marketing obviously. In number of shipped copies, Linux users number between 5 and 10 million, far beyond where BeOS is and about on par with MacOS. BeOS actually got most of its press by being the first Macintosh-centric OS. So it wasn't actually competing against Microsoft, and as such it had a much easier time getting press because it was competing against this other niche market, right? I don't think they're going to make it because it's just too hard to commercially compete with Microsoft right now. boot: Is Linux doomed to be a niche OS? Torvalds: No, but I'm actually hoping that it won't take more than 25% or 30% of the market. If Linux owned 95% of the market it would be equally as sick. There is some need for competition. boot: Are you happy with the current level of success? Torvalds: Yes, it's just incredible. Considering that it was a young university student who started this seven years ago, and now Linux is being considered by some as the only alternative to Microsoft, how much more successful do I need to get? boot: Can Linux survive without marketing? Torvalds: With the Internet it can. Even though there is very little commercial marketing, there is a lot of noise about Linux on the Internet. You have a lot of Linux-specific and even nonspecific news groups out there. When it's a web newsgroup talking about web serving, probably the most popular platform for that is Linux. Linux is more of a grassroots movement. It's not really planned; it just happens. And I think that Linux has enough features that it can make-do without marketing. boot: You've got a full slate of global developers working on Linux. Why hasn't it devolved into chaos? Torvalds: It's chaos that has some external constraints put on it. For example, the pure kernel has a copyright that says that whoever does Linux development doesn't need to go through me. If Microsoft--or anyone else--wanted to, they could take Linux tomorrow, start development on it, and do it completely on their own. However, they're required to make all the changes available to everybody else. This "no ownership" idea means that the only entity that can really succeed in developing Linux is the entity that is trusted to do the right thing. And as it stands right now, I'm the only entity that has that degree of trust. It allows chaos, but at the same time it has certain built-in things that just make it very stable. But you really need to be very good to take over development. Knowing that the best person will be there to pick it up is exactly the kind of security feature you need in a development network. boot: By nature of your current stature, some would accuse you of profiting from Linux's success. Have you done that and does this diminish Linux's overall "free OS" movement? Torvalds: Profiting? I'm getting a lot of recognition and some of it is not necessarily deserved. I've done a lot of the really core functionality of the kernel, but there's been hundreds of other people who have written drivers for specific devices. And to some degree they get less recognition than they really should in this area because I'm the only person who people really see as the figurehead of the development. Bill Gates gets all the glory for Microsoft even though he's got thousands of people working for him. boot: Are you making any money on Linux at all? Torvalds: No. Because I made Linux, I was able to make a name for myself, and I have a much better job than I would have otherwise. So that kind of indirect thing obviously exists. A few years ago people knew I was a poor student. At Christmas time I used to get a few personal checks of $100 or so. It didn't pay for development, but it was nice knowing that people care so much they're willing to pay even a small amount of money just because they want to. boot: Is "Linux" a variation of your name? Torvalds: Yes. Originally the official name was supposed to be Freix (pronounced "freaks"). But it turns out that the person who had the FTP site in Finland didn't like the "Freix" (the "ix" is from Unix), so he decided on Linux instead. boot: Is there a platform that Linux can't be ported to or used on? Torvalds: I used to think you really wouldn't want to port Linux to anything without a good memory-management unit, and then a few crazy people actually ported Linux to the PalmPilot. And once somebody has done something like that, it has to be portable to just about anything. boot: Is Linux still useful as a teaching aid? Torvalds: Yes. When you're teaching about operating systems, you need to be able to show how things are done. And with Linux this is trivial because you have sources and you have no obligations put on you from those sources. Microsoft has given source licenses for NT to big universities. But in giving those source licenses they tend to require certain things, such as requiring the students to sign nondisclosure agreements. While that's OK for a certain class of school, it's not OK for a university that thinks it should allow people to also talk about what they have learned. So any serious university would not accept that kind of license. I've actually been disgusted how many nonserious universities there are. There are universities that are considered to be reasonably good but teach people skills that must not be used in a professional capacity, except if they happen to be professionals at Microsoft. I find that to be fairly immoral for a school. boot: You and Bill Gates walk into a dark alley. Who walks out? Torvalds: [laughs] I have no idea. I think both. boot: Why? Torvalds: I don't think Bill Gates dislikes me personally. I don't think he lies awake during the night. I think he's very aware of Linux, but I don't think he's worried, at least not yet. And for reasons I've already outlined, I'm not worried about Bill Gates because I don't care about the marketing side. Bill Gates is always mentioned to be this super programmer and is head of this big software firm, but he's really a marketing person. He used to know how to program, but I don't think he's programmed in a long time. Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates don't exist in the same sphere. boot: Would you ever work for Microsoft? Torvalds: Yes. I wouldn't say no to a job just because it's Microsoft, but it would have to be a real dream job, and right now I don't see Microsoft having that kind of dream job. But I don't have any religious belief that Microsoft is evil and that Bill Gates is Satan. boot: What features do you have lined up for the next version? Torvalds: The next version is not going to be a big step. It's going to be mainly a performance release. It's more of a maturity thing. 2.2 will officially add the PowerPC and SPARC support, and improved SMP support. I expect it to be released sometime this summer. boot: What about version 3? Torvalds: We don't have any real plans. The obvious things we're looking into are clustering and more scalability. And we want to support certain things that WINE needs for Windows emulation. Version 2.2 will have more support for Window threading under WINE. Linux has had threading support for some time, but it still isn't window-specific. boot: If you were sitting on a plane next to a CEO of a Fortune 50 company that wasn't using Linux, what would you say to persuade them to use it? Torvalds: The sad thing is that a Fortune 50 company probably is using Linux, but the CEO won't know it. So they'll be using Linux in the engineering department or in support or something like this, but it won't be obvious enough that the CEO will be aware of that fact. The one common way that Linux gets adopted inside organizations is by a small group of people who are working on a very specific project. They set up servers for their project and use Linux because it's usually the choice that needs the least paperwork. It isn't officially supported anywhere, but it's used in various places and then half a year later when another group has similar needs, they take notice. Sometimes companies decree "this is unacceptable," but most usually unofficially bless it. boot: Will there be a time when Linux won't be available for free? Torvalds: No. boot: You say that very quickly. Torvalds: Yes. One of the reasons I say it quickly is I've been asked the question before, and I also have made certain there is no way anybody can take the freeness away. I very strongly feel that it's a good thing, and the copyright requires it. And when somebody sends me big patches, I don't ask them to assign the copyright over to me. So right now, for example, the kernel itself has probably on the order of 50 or 100 copyright holders and the actual copyright license has always been the same. It's the GPL that requires that sources always be available. So in order to make a version of Linux that is not under that license, you have to get all those copyright holders to agree to the new license. The parts of the kernel that I own completely are significant, but they aren't enough to really make a good system. I did that consciously. I wanted to bind my own hands so that even if people don't trust me personally, they trust the fact that even if I wanted to turn commercial, I couldn't. boot: What would Linux's tagline be? Torvalds: Very early on I reached the conclusion that anything I ever get in e-mail is just hot air until I see some real code or some real fruit of the discussion. So we used one that we stole from Nike: "Just Do It". It says don't spout fire, just do it; and then after it's done, show the world. boot: What's up with the penguin? Torvalds: The penguin doesn't have any real meaning, but it relates to a trip I took to Australia four or five years ago when I was bitten by a fairy penguin. boot: What the hell is a "fairy penguin?" Torvalds: Fairy penguins are these ferocious animals about ten inches high with a beak that couldn't kill a human or even a smaller animal. Unfortunately, one bit me when I attempted to pet it. It was love at first sight. A few years later when we were discussing what kind of logo people wanted, I decided on the penguin. Some people are still unhappy because they think that it's too noncommercial, but it's meant to be more fun than serious. I'm much happier being associated with a fun and slightly irreverent logo than with something static and boring. ------------------ END Entire contents copyright 1998 by Imagine Media Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited. All submissions become the property of Imagine Media Inc.