Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

When I went there, I kind of knew Bill Joy was there. He had been the key person behind BSD Unix and later joined Sun as chief scientist. I had never met him before. He just came up to me and said he was Bill Joy and I kind of didn't react to it. I hadn't come there to meet him but to see what Sun thought about open source and how they were going to enter open source. A few minutes later, Bill himself was explaining the reasons for making it open source and they had a limited demonstration of the system.

Then they started explaining their licensing. It was horrible. Just stupid. Basically it boiled down to the fact that if somebody else wanted to use the system in even a half-commercial way, it wouldn't be open source at all. I thought it was a completely idiotic idea. I was really upset about the fact that, on the invitation, they had touted their open-sourceness. It was open source in the sense that you could read the source, but if you wanted to make any modifications or make it part of your infrastructure, you had to license it from Sun. If somebody at Red Hat wanted to make the latest Red Hat CD version of Linux Jini-aware, the company would have to license the Jini technology from Sun.

I asked a few questions to see if I had understood it correctly.

Then I walked out on them.

I was just so pissed off that they had gotten people there by claiming open-sourceness that after I found out what it was all about I literally said, "Forget it, I'm not interested," and left.

My understanding was that they wanted me there simply to inform me and that maybe if I had been enthusiastic they would have liked a press quote or something. That plan backfired. But maybe they will learn. Apparently people later convinced them to open source their Star Office. So I guess it all just takes time.

I'm told that they continued the meeting that day and had dinner, and that everybody else stayed.

The second time I met Bill Joy turned out to be a much better experience. About a year and a half later he invited me out for sushi.

His secretary phoned me to set up a time. Bill lives and works in Colorado and apparently spends one week out of each month in Silicon Valley. We went to Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto. It's one of the better sushi places in the Valley. Of course it's nothing like Blowfish Sushi in San Francisco, with its nonstop Japanese animations to look at, or Tokyo Go Go in the Mission, with its hip crowd, or Sushi Ran in Sausalito, with its important patrons, or Seto Sushi in Sunnyvale, which has the best spicy tuna sushi of them all.

Okay, we were at Fuki Sushi, and it was kind of fun because Bill was trying to get real wasabi. I didn't know this at the time, but in most Japanese restaurants in the United States, what passes for wasabi is actually just colored horseradish. It turns out the wasabi plant lives only in Japanese streams and is difficult to grow commercially. Bill tried to explain this to the waitress and she really didn't get the concept. She was Japanese, but she thought that wasabi was wasabi. He asked her to ask the chefs.

The back-and-forth was sort of funny. This was a social dinner. He basically made it clear that if I wanted to work for Sun I could just give him the word and he would make something happen. But that was not the main thing. It was more of an opportunity to talk about the issues. He started reminiscing about how he'd been the maintainer of BSD Unix for five years and how he had grown to appreciate having the commercial side around him through Sun. He talked about how important it was to have the kind of commercial support that a company like Sun could provide. I found it fun and interesting to hear him talk about the early days of Unix. It didn't make one bit of difference to me that we were never able to taste genuine wasabi. I distinctly remember thinking he was probably the nicest and most interesting of the high-profile people I had met in Silicon Valley.

Flash forward three years. I pick up Wired magazine only to encounter his horribly negative article about technology entitled "The Future Doesn't Need US." I was kind of disappointed. Obviously, the future doesn't need us. But he didn't have to be so negative about it.

I don't want to tear apart his article line by line, but I have a general belief that the saddest thing that could ever happen to humanity would be that we would just go on and on, as opposed to evolving. Bill seemed to feel that advances like genetic modification make us lose our humanity. Everybody always thinks that something different is inhuman because right now we are human. But as we continue to evolve with whatever happens, in 10,000 years we will not be human according to today's standards. We will just be a different form of human.

In Bill's article, he seemed afraid of that. My feeling is that it's unnatural-and fruitless-to try and curb evolution. Instead of trying to find two different kinds of dog to produce the desired offspring, obviously we will resort to genetics; it seems inevitable that this will happen for people, too. In my opinion, changing the human race through genetics is preferable to leaving the status quo. I think that, in the bigger picture, it would be a hell of a lot more interesting to ensure the continued evolution of not just humans but of society, in whatever direction it goes. You can't stop technology, and you can't stop the advances we make in our knowledge of how our universe works and how humans are designed. It's all moving so fast that some people, like Bill Joy, find it scary. But I see it as part of our natural evolution.

I disagree with Joy about how we should deal with the future the same way I disagreed with his notion of open source. I disagreed with Steve Jobs about technology. It sounds like I spent my first years in Silicon Valley being disagreeable, but that's not true. I was doing a lot of coding and taking Patricia to the petting zoo and in general broadening my horizons-like learning the awful truth about wasabi.

Our overnight success.

Do you ever read advocacy newsgroups? The entire purpose of their existence is to advocate something, which means to put something else down. So if you go on them you find nothing but "My system is better than your system" nonsense. It's its own form of online masturbation.

The reason I mention advocacy newsgroups is that, despite their absurdity, they do offer a clue to what is happening. So when corporations first decided that Linux was the darling of operating systems, the growing commercial support wasn't discussed first in the press or at the checkout counter at Fry's Electronics, but on advocacy newsgroups.

Let me back up. In the spring of 1998, a third blonde entered my world: Daniela Yolanda Torvalds got produced on April 16th, making her the first Torvalds to be a U.S. citizen. She and Patricia are sixteen months apart, the same as Sara and me. But I guarantee they won't be as embattled as my sister and I were growing up -- certainly not with Tove's moderating influence. Or her karate skills.

Two weeks before Daniela's birth, the open source community -- which had until recently been called the free software community -- got its biggest boost ever. That's when Netscape opened up the source code for its browser technology in a project named Mozilla. On the one hand, the news got everyone on the newsgroups excited because it raised the visibility of open source. But it also made a lot of people, including me, fairly nervous. Netscape was in trouble at the time, thanks in large part to Microsoft, and the opening up of its browser was seen as a somewhat desperate measure. (Ironically, the browser's roots were in open source. It began as a project at the University of Illinois.)

People on the newsgroups were expressing their fears that Netscape would muck things up and give open source a bad name.