linus torwald

linus torwald

To many in the software trade, the craziest and most magical thing here is a Microsoft executive extolling the importance of open source. The rise of open source has indeed been huge, epochal even. And, like many significant inventions—nuclear power, antibiotics—open source carries risks. Some pretty weird ones, it turns out.

Microsoft was making obscene amounts of money through Windows and Office, and closely guarded the source code of these products. As the U.S. Department of Justice began trying to reckon with Microsoft’s influence over innovation and competition, DIY hacker types such as Torvalds argued that the very idea of patented proprietary software stood in opposition to free speech, free access to public goods and knowledge, and progress itself. (This was less radical than it might sound; U.S. law didn’t recognize software as intellectual property until the late ’70s.)

These idealists injected a dose of counterculture spirit into the debate over how much control a few large companies ought to have around technological advances. Linux became the most prominent alternative to Windows, and other coders created a free package of open source Office alternatives called, of course, OpenOffice. Both products struggled to find a mainstream audience, partly because the developers were sometimes more focused on the source code’s purity than on its usability. Yet they gained valuable experience building development tools that made it easier to collaborate and widely distribute software. They could simply put their code online and let word of mouth and network effects do most of the rest. It took a long time—with lots of bitter fights and lawsuits along the way—but eventually, op

Google led the corporate charge in the early 2000s. Instead of buying expensive operating systems, Google ran Linux on the servers in its data centers. Then, it took open source databases and file systems and wrote its own open source applications to fill in the gaps. This reliance on free software made it easier for Google to afford to give away services such as search, email, maps, and others. Facebook, Uber, Netflix, and many others would do the same. Today, open source is the engine of most major computing advances. Amazon. com Inc.’s massive cloud networks rely on Linux and many other free apps to function, which means that the tens of thousands of businesses that buy computing power from Amazon’s data centers are living the open source lifestyle, too. Google has placed Android, a variant of Linux, on more than 1 billion smartphones.

Torvalds draws a healthy salary from the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit funded by companies such as Google, IBM, Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holdings, and Intel to further develop the operating system. His total annual compensation of about $1.8 million is more than enough for him to buy a nice house in Portland and do as he pleases, which mostly means sitting at home coding. But if he’d been more interested in financial rewards and the daily grind, the guy might well have Bill Gates money. On paper, the company that’s made the most money from Linux is Red Hat Inc., which has created a custom version of the operating system and charges client businesses to keep it updated and secure. IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion earlier this year in the biggest-ever software deal. GitHub users can also opt to sponsor coders or projects that interest them, à la Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites. Often, though, open source coders don’t get paid what they’re worth, and their status as hobbyists complicates the corporate world’s reliance on their work. About this time last year a 48-year-old software developer in Sweden named Daniel Stenberg received a panicked call one evening from a large German automaker. The car company, which Stenberg declines to name, asked that he fly to Germany immediately because an application Stenberg had written was causing the entertainment system software in 7 million cars to crash. “I had to inform them that, you know, this is a spare-time project for me and that I have a full-time job and can’t just go to Germany for them,” Stenberg says. “They started out pretty demanding, but then switched when they realized the situation they were in.”

t. “If you don’t have control over the technology that runs your life, the devices and services that run your life, then your life will be run by other people using the computers,” says Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia who’s spent decades at the fore of the free software movement.   “We made good stuff, and it was turned into ammunition against our dreams.”

Moglen says he appreciates the leveling effect that GitHub can have—it’s one of the best places for a talented 16-year-old programmer in Cambodia or Nigeria to show off her skills and alter the economic course of her life. Still, Moglen is counting on young people to form the core of a greater backlash against big tech companies’ privacy grabs. He’s pitching a hardware-software package called the FreedomBox, which costs about $90. It’s a small computer that uses open source software to replicate many of the common internet services (search, messaging, file-sharing) away from the prying eyes of the tech giants.