The
accidental leader
Linux creator Linus Torvalds runs a global empire from his
basement, rarely sees his colleagues and works mostly in his
bathrobe. And it’s still more organization than he likes.
By Christina Williams
In 1991, Linus Torvalds,
a Finnish hacker, started developing an operating system with the
intent to make it available for free to the world. Since then,
Linux has evolved from a counter-culture technology to a stock
market phenomenon to a cost-effective choice for running
corporate computer systems. These days, this open-source
operating system has gone mainstream, and economic development
types in Oregon hope to capitalize on its popularity by branding
the state as the center for open-source activity.
Two and a half years ago,
Torvalds, a rock star in tech circles, moved his family to Oregon
and took a job with Beaverton’s Open Source Development
Lab. He’s still doing what he started at 21. Working in a
virtual world with a small army of volunteer programmers who fix
every bug and craft each improvement, Torvalds maintains the
core, or kernel, of Linux. Oregon Business’ Christina
Williams sat down with Torvalds recently to see what he’s
up to, virtually and otherwise.
Oregon Business: How are you
adjusting to life in Oregon?
Linus Torvalds: My family is part of the reason we left
California. We were a bit outside the Bay Area because we
wanted to have a big house for three kids but we had neighbors
that we just did not know because everyone was working,
working, working. The kids went to private school and we
shuttled them 20 minutes each way. Everything was just far away
enough that it wasn’t much fun. And now we live much more
centrally and downtown is literally 10 to 15 minutes away. We
don’t go that often, because with small kids, it’s
not like you actually go. But the kids run between the houses
and we know our neighbors and I have poker nights and the kids
have sleepovers. People here are so relaxed.
Did that surprise
you?
No, it was part of the plan. To get out of the crazy Bay Area.
We knew the weather wasn’t going to be great.
Do you consider yourself part
of the Oregon business community?
I’ve never considered myself part of the business
community. I mean, the Oregon community is fine. But business,
that’s not me. I go to conferences occasionally. Like
recently I was at a conference in Rome, talking to VPs of big
companies, but that’s actually not who I work with. What
I do is I sit in my ratty bathrobe downstairs and I talk to
other engineers. So I’m not a part of any business
community whatsoever. I actually don’t go to that many
conferences.
I’m sure you could wear
yourself out going to all the conferences that you get invited
to.
I did. There was one year where I was traveling half the year
— out of 365 days, I was away 180. And I didn’t
even like public speaking. So I decided it was time to stop
going to so many conferences. I didn’t stop cold turkey,
but I stopped.
Early on, did you feel like
it was your duty to represent Linux?
That was part of it. I couldn’t foist it off to anyone
else initially. And now — I’m not that great at
public speaking, there are people who are better at it. So I go
to two technical conferences a year and one or two of the
high-level things.
For people who only have a
vague idea of what Linux is and how it’s developed, how
do you describe it?
An operating system is hard to describe because it
doesn’t do anything on its own. It’s not supposed
to. It’s just supposed to be a common layer between the
machine and the programs which actually really do something.
What I do is I lay the infrastructure for someone getting real
work done. The cheesy, nontechnical comparison is the roadway.
It’s the roadway, it’s the sewers, it’s all
the crap you need to get your work done every day that you
never think about, unless it’s messed up. That’s
part of why I think open source works really well. It’s
something that everybody needs and not a lot of people really
should care anything about. I care because it’s
interesting from a technical angle, but not a lot of users
should care.
I’ve heard you describe
what you do as playing the “benevolent dictator” of
Linux, telling theprogrammers who work on the code what to do.
Are you still comfortable with that label?
I don’t know. I don’t even so much tell people
what to do. I really don’t. Because most of the time
people know what I want to do. And, in fact, if they
didn’t, I wouldn’t often know what to tell them.
What I end up doing is more communication and keeping it all
together. So I’m a manager without the human resources
part. I don’t support people in the sense of the
logistics. But I manage the technical side and I manage their
output. I’m the place where people come to make
everything all fit together. And on the other hand, the
benevolent dictatorship part is somewhat true because at some
point you just have to say what goes in and what doesn’t.
Somebody has to do that and you can do it different ways.
On some projects — both in open-source and in commercial
companies — you have this process that you go
through for vetting stuff where sometimes it’s more like
voting. In order for changes to happen, you have to have five
people agree about it. I’m not a big fan of the voting
thing. I’m more of the opinion that he who actually does
the work gets to decide. It’s not a popularity
contest.
How many active Linux
developers are there?
I’ve actually done the statistics, but they’re
half a year old. At that time, there were basically 1,000
people who had submitted code just to the kernel [the core of
the Linux operating system], which is probably one of the
biggest projects.
And what are these 1,000
programmers doing?
I think there are about 50 people who do about 80% of the
work. It’s very skewed. So it depends on how you count.
If you count the people who are the main developers, it’s
50 people. If you count who develops at all, it’s 1,000.
Then if you look at who does a lot of testing, those
wouldn’t show up in my statistics. The Linux companies,
or companies that are somehow involved in Linux, do a lot of
the testing and then they send in reports [to the developers]
about problems or performance issues they find with the
operating system. It’s not a very glamorous part of the
system. It’s actually the really boring crap that I would
never want to do. But it makes things work, so it’s
important.
It’s such an amazing
example of collaboration. But it’s got to be messy. Does
it work seamlessly?
It actually does. If you come from the traditional corporate
setup and you know that works and you compare that to the Linux
world, the Linux world looks completely disorganized. Because
it is. I have never put anything on paper. There are a few
guidelines, some of them tongue in cheek, about how
you’re supposed to act as a maintainer and what works and
what doesn’t. Humor works when you talk to people. But
there’s never been any real organization.
The reason I think it works so well is that it’s all
self-organized. For people who are doing sociology studies,
self-organizing is actually a huge turn-on. Linux doesn’t
work the way a traditional organization works, but it does work
the way human social interaction works. For example, I
don’t actually talk to 1,000 people because that’s
not how humans work. So I have five to 10 people who I work
with very closely, the way people tend to have a couple of best
friends. And they have five to 10 people they work with. Then
there are people I meet and I take a patch [a change to the
code] from but it’s not like we’re buddies. And I
think it works because that’s very basically how human
beings are wired up to work. The whole hierarchy model —
the fact that works is the strange part because that’s
not how people are mentally wired, to take orders like that. I
mean we’re pack animals, but we’re not that kind of
pack animal.
So the people you do work
closely with, how often to you see them face to
face?
Almost never. At the two technical conferences maybe.
There’s a couple in the Portland area so I’ve had
breakfast with some of them, and I’ve had one
dinner with them in the last two years and I’ve been to
one of the beer fests they’ve had. Occasionally at
conferences you talk things over, but you usually talk about it
over a beer.
So no formal
meetings.
No, that doesn’t work. Even if you start working
face-to-face it might seem efficient, but from a technical
standpoint it’s horrible because speaking is not actually
a good way to talk about details. It’s much easier to
e-mail someone an example of what you’re really working
on. Also, if you do face-to-face, you automatically put a wall
between the group you’re meeting with and everybody else.
And that’s just stupid because everyone else is actually
a much bigger community.
Has this collective
development model evolved over time?
The kind of overview I’m talking about now, that’s
always been there. But there are a lot of other details.
We have completely changed all the development tools several
times. We’ve made it easier to track things
together. We’ve changed a lot of details basically.
It’s very different when you have just 10 people
work-
ing on it than when you have 100 people and people come and
go; you can’t use the same detail model. But the
freewheeling part has always been there.
Do you consider yourself a
mentor to the younger developers?
(Laughing) I hope not! You know, I’m not a big believer
in this whole leadership thing. I’m supposed to be this
leader and this important person and I just know myself and
I’m not that. What I am is I’m lazy. And I’m
good at communicating and that means that, yes, I do mentoring,
but I don’t do mentoring because I want to improve
somebody else. I do mentoring in that I try to explain what I
see as the problem and I try to explain what I see as the
solution so that somebody else can actually do the work. You
could see it as being a mentor and maybe basically it’s
the same thing, but the approach is different. I really
don’t think leadership works. But what I’ve done,
some of it consciously and some of it just because things
happen, is to create this environment where people just enjoy
working together. And that’s more important than just
telling people what to do or how to do it — laying the
groundwork to make people want to do it on their own.
But some people would say
that’s leadership.
Right. I’m more against the word leadership because the
word leadership implies telling people what to do.
So could this whole thing run
without you?
Yeah. It often does. And I take all the credit anyway. The
biggest part is having gotten the ball rolling. And I end up
doing a lot of the integration, but I couldn’t do it all,
which goes back to that lazy thing. All good programmers are
lazy because the whole point is to get the computer to do
something for you so that you don’t have to. I used to
describe how we work as a hierarchy, where I was at the top and
I had a few people under me and they had a few lieutenants
under them. But that’s not actually how it works.
It’s more of a network and some people have much stronger
ties than others and by having stronger ties, they’re
better at doing things together. To some degree I have the most
ties, but if I’m not there, things don’t really
change.
Has your philosophy on your
work changed over time?
Sure. When I started, I didn’t think about any of this.
I did what I did because I was interested in the technology and
I made it available so that others could play with it because I
thought it was fun. It was an interesting project. People
started sending me patches and it just started working. For the
first few years, nobody thought about it really. And these days
people take open source for granted — they know that it
works. The question I get now about open source is: Can you
tell me how it works? That wasn’t true 10 years ago.
Then, I was getting questions like: How can it possibly work
and how can you be so naïve that you think people being
nice to each other could work? A lot of what I think about open
source is really about rationalizing why it works. Which is how
I think most people think anyway. Man is not a rational
animal, man is a rationalizing animal. Almost anything you
think about, you’re trying to explain after the fact.
Another word that I hate that is way too common in the tech
world is visionary. Visionary people are usually really
annoying and they have this notion of what the world should
look like and they try to explain why it should look like that.
I’m not a huge fan of that.
But I’m sure
you’ve been accused of being a visionary.
Yes, and every time someone says, “That’s
visionary,” I say no, anti-visionary. Just do it, like
the old Nike slogan. Some things work and some things
don’t. The ones that work, you usually can’t figure
it out beforehand anyway. If you could figure it out
beforehand, it would be so trivial that someone else would have
done it already. And that’s very true of technology in
general. If you claim to know what’s going to happen,
you’re just full of shit.
Has the adoption of Linux and
open source, where we are today, surprised you?
It’s all been fairly gradual, gradual but fast. So if
the question is, “Did you ever expect this to
happen?” The answer is no. But that doesn’t imply
that it’s surprising just because I’ve been doing
this for 15 years and that’s a lot longer than most
people do one single thing. That’s more like rearing a
child than holding a job. It hasn’t been overnight.
What’s your role at
OSDL? Do you spend much time there?
I go to quarterly lunches. I’m not good at meetings,
either. I hate meetings. So I go into the office occasionally,
but all the work I do is by e-mail. The engineer I work closest
with, Andrew Morton, is also employed by OSDL and he lives in
Palo Alto. We work under the same umbrella, but that
doesn’t mean that we see each other ever.
You mentioned you’ve
been doing this for 15 years, and you’re young, just 36.
Do you think you’ll move on from this eventually and do
something else?
I thought I’d do something else 10 years ago.
Fifteen years is a long time but 50 years is much longer.
So, yes, probably I will do something else but I don’t
know what it is right now. I don’t have any plans.
I’ve never had any plans. When it gets to the point where
people either don’t trust me because I’m just too
old-fashioned or I just don’t feel it’s very
interesting, things will change.
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