The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 100

“Greed is never good,” Torvalds declared. His approach helped turn him into a folk hero, suitable for veneration at conferences and on magazine covers as the anti-Gates. Charmingly, he was self-aware enough to know that he relished such acclaim and that this made him a little bit more egotistical than his admirers realized. “I’ve never been the selfless, ego-free, techno-lovechild the hallucinating press insists I am,” he admitted.¹³⁵

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. “My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish,” he said. “I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help.”¹³⁶

His instinct was right. His release of his Linux kernel led to a tsunami of peer-to-peer volunteer collaboration that became a model of the shared production that propelled digital-age innovation.¹³⁷ By the fall of 1992, a year after its release, Linux’s newsgroup on the Internet had tens of thousands of users. Selfless collaborators added improvements such as a Windows-like graphical interface and tools to facilitate the networking of computers. Whenever there was a bug, someone somewhere stepped in to fix it. In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, one of the seminal theorists of the open software movement, propounded what he called “Linus’s Law”: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”¹³⁸

Peer-to-peer sharing and commons-based collaboration were nothing new. An entire field of evolutionary biology has arisen around the question of why humans, and members of some other species, cooperate in what seem to be altruistic ways. The tradition of forming voluntary associations, found in all societies, was especially strong in early America, evidenced in cooperative ventures ranging from quilting bees to barn raisings. “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote.¹³⁹ Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography propounded an entire civic creed, with the motto “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine,” to explain his formation of voluntary associations to create a hospital, militia, street-sweeping corps, fire brigade, lending library, night-watch patrol, and many other community endeavors.

The hacker corps that grew up around GNU and Linux showed that emotional incentives, beyond financial rewards, can motivate voluntary collaboration. “Money is not the greatest of motivators,” Torvalds said. “Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.” There is also, intended or not, some self-interest involved. “Hackers are also motivated, in large part, by the esteem they can gain in the eyes of their peers by making solid contributions. . . . Everybody wants to impress their peers, improve their reputation, elevate their social status. Open source development gives programmers the chance.”

Gates’s “Letter to Hobbyists,” complaining about the unauthorized sharing of Microsoft BASIC, asked in a chiding way, “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” Torvalds found that an odd outlook. He and Gates were from two very different cultures, the communist-tinged radical academia of Helsinki versus the corporate elite of Seattle. Gates may have ended up with the bigger house, but Torvalds reaped antiestablishment adulation. “Journalists seemed to love the fact that, while Gates lived in a high-tech lakeside mansion, I was tripping over my daughter’s playthings in a three-bedroom ranch house with bad plumbing in boring Santa Clara,” he said with ironic self-awareness. “And that I drove a boring Pontiac. And answered my own phone. Who wouldn’t love me?”

Torvalds was able to master the digital-age art of being an accepted leader of a massive, decentralized, nonhierarchical collaboration, something that Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia was doing at around the same time. The first rule for such a situation is to make decisions like an engineer, based on technical merit rather than personal considerations. “It was a way of getting people to trust me,” Torvalds explained. “When people trust you, they take your advice.” He also realized that leaders in a voluntary collaborative have to encourage others to follow their passion, not boss them around. “The best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.” Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it’s done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. “What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works,” Torvalds said. “People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens. No voting. No orders. No recounts.”¹⁴⁰

The combination of GNU with Linux represented, at least in concept, the triumph of Richard Stallman’s crusade. But moral prophets rarely indulge in victory celebrations. Stallman was a purist. Torvalds wasn’t. The Linux kernel he eventually distributed contained some binary blobs with proprietary features. That could be remedied; indeed Stallman’s Free Software Foundation created a version that was completely free and nonproprietary. But there was a deeper and more emotional issue for Stallman. He complained that referring to the operating system as “Linux,” which almost everybody did, was misleading. Linux was the name of the kernel. The system as a whole should be called GNU/Linux, he insisted, sometimes angrily. One person who was at a software expo recounted how Stallman had reacted when a nervous fourteen-year-old boy asked him about Linux. “You ripped into that boy and tore him a brand new asshole, and I watched as his face fell and his devotion to you and our cause crumpled in a heap,” the onlooker later berated Stallman.¹⁴¹

Stallman also insisted that the goal should be to create what he called free software, a phrase that reflected a moral imperative to share. He objected to the phrase that Torvalds and Eric Raymond began to use, open-source software, which emphasized the pragmatic goal of getting people to collaborate in order to create software more effectively. In practice, most free software is also open-source and vice versa; they are usually thrown together under the rubric of free and open-source software. But to Stallman it mattered not only how you made your software but also your motivations. Otherwise the movement might be susceptible to compromise and corruption.

The disputes went beyond mere substance and became, in some ways, ideological. Stallman was possessed by a moral clarity and unyielding aura, and he lamented that “anyone encouraging idealism today faces a great obstacle: the prevailing ideology encourages people to dismiss idealism as ‘impractical.’?”¹⁴² Torvalds, on the contrary, was unabashedly practical, like an engineer. “I led the pragmatists,” he said. “I have always thought that idealistic people are interesting, but kind of boring and scary.”¹⁴³

Torvalds admitted to “not exactly being a huge fan” of Stallman, explaining, “I don’t like single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there aren’t just two sides to any issue, there’s almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends’ is almost always the right answer in any big question.”¹⁴⁴ He also believed that it should be permissible to make money from open-source software. “Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which fuels so much of society’s technological advancement, be excluded?”¹⁴⁵ Software may want to be free, but the people who write it may want to feed their kids and reward their investors.