[Linux-disciples] The Linux 'revolt'

[Stephen R Laniel]

I include the article below.

Linux Inc.
Linus Torvalds once led a ragtag band of software geeks. Not
anymore. Here's an inside look at how the unusual Linux
business model increasingly threatens Microsoft

Five years ago, Linus Torvalds faced a mutiny. The reclusive
Finn had taken the lead in creating the Linux computer
operating system, with help from thousands of volunteer
programmers, and the open-source software had become wildly
popular for running Web sites during the dot-com boom. But
just as Linux was taking off, some programmers rebelled.
Torvalds' insistence on manually reviewing everything that
went into the software was creating a logjam, they warned.
Unless he changed his ways, they might concoct a rival
software package -- a threat that could have crippled Linux.
"Everybody knew things were falling apart," recalls Larry
McVoy, a programmer who played peacemaker. "Something had to
be done."


The crisis came to a head during a tense meeting at McVoy's
house, on San Francisco's Twin Peaks. A handful of Linux'
top contributors took turns urging Torvalds to change. After
an awkward dinner of quiche and croissants, they sat on the
living room floor and hashed things out. Four hours later,
Torvalds relented. He agreed to delegate more and use a
software program for automating the handling of code. When
the program was ready in 2002, Torvalds was able to process
contributions five times as fast as he had in the past.

The Twin Peaks truce is just one of the dramatic changes
during the past few years in the way Linux is made and
distributed. The phenomenon that Torvalds kicked off as a
student at the University of Helsinki in 1991 had long been
a loosey-goosey effort, with little structure or
organization. Young students and caffeine-jazzed iconoclasts
wrote much of the code in their spare time, while the
overtaxed Torvalds stitched in improvements almost
singlehandedly.

TURNING PRO 
Today, that approach is quaint history. Little understood by
the outside world, the community of Linux programmers has
evolved in recent years into something much more mature,
organized, and efficient. Put bluntly, Linux has turned pro.
Torvalds now has a team of lieutenants, nearly all of them
employed by tech companies, that oversees development of
top-priority projects. Tech giants such as IBM (IBM ),
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), and Intel (INTC ) are clustered
around the Finn, contributing technology, marketing muscle,
and thousands of professional programmers. IBM alone has 600
programmers dedicated to Linux, up from two in 1999. There's
even a board of directors that helps set the priorities for
Linux development.

The result is a much more powerful Linux. The software is
making its way into everything from Motorola (MOT ) cell
phones and Mitsubishi robots to eBay (EBAY ) servers and the
NASA supercomputers that run space-shuttle simulations. Its
growing might is shaking up the technology industry,
challenging Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) dominance and offering
up a new model for creating software. Indeed, Torvalds'
onetime hobby has become Linux Inc. "People thought this
wouldn't work. There are just too many people and companies
to hang together. But now it's clear it does work," says
Mark Blowers, an analyst at market researcher Butler Group.

Not that this Inc. operates like a traditional corporation.
Hardly. There's no headquarters, no CEO, and no annual
report. And it's not a single company. Rather, it's a
cooperative venture in which employees at about two dozen
companies, along with thousands of individuals, work
together to improve Linux software. The tech companies
contribute sweat equity to the project, largely by paying
programmers' salaries, and then make money by selling
products and services around the Linux operating system.
They don't charge for Linux itself, since under the
cooperative's rules the software is available to all comers
for free.

How do companies benefit from free software? In several
different ways. Distributors, including Red Hat Inc. (RHAT )
and Novell Inc., (NOVL ) package Linux with helpful user
manuals, regular updates, and customer service, and then
charge customers annual subscription fees for all the
extras. Those fees range from $35 a year for a basic desktop
version of Linux to $1,500 for a high-end server version.
The dollars can add up. Red Hat, which employs 200
programmers, is expected to see profits triple, to $53
million, in its current fiscal year, as revenues surge 56%,
to $195 million.

Those numbers are dwarfed by the winnings for computer
makers that sell PCs and servers preloaded with Linux. IBM,
HP, and others capitalize on the ability to sell machines
without any up-front charge for an operating-system license,
which can range up to several thousand dollars for some
versions of Windows and Unix. At HP, sales of servers that
run the Linux operating system hit nearly $3 billion during
the past fiscal year, almost double the tally three years
ago.

In the Linux community, this kind of red-meat capitalism is
combined with the sharing philosophy of the open-source
movement. Dick Porter, a T-shirted coder who often works
under an apple tree in his garden in Wales, is on the same
team with Jim Stallings, a hard-charging ex-Marine who
travels the world making deals for IBM. What they have in
common is a keen interest in making Linux ever more capable.
The result is a culture that's cooperative, meritocratic --
and Darwinian at the same time. Any company or person is
free to participate in Linux Inc., and those with the most
to offer win recognition and prominent roles. "Linux is the
first natural business ecosystem," says James F. Moore, a
senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
at Harvard Law School.

STRANGE GROUND 
To understand the inner workings of Linux Inc., BusinessWeek
took a journey through the fast-evolving ecosystem. The
unusual trip included everything from sitting in on gritty
developer meetings to interviewing dozens of tech execs and
engineers from Germany to China. One stop was Torvalds'
home, just south of Portland, Ore. The 34-year-old moved
from Silicon Valley last summer, in part because he was
hired by the Beaverton (Ore.) Linux advocacy group Open
Source Development Labs Inc. (OSDL). He spent several hours
talking about Linux as his three towheaded daughters played
nearby. Something of a rock star in techie circles, he was
preparing for a flight to Los Angeles for the premiere of
Shark Tale -- which was animated on Linux computers -- and
was taking along his oldest daughter, Patricia, then 7 years
old.

What's clear from these interviews is that the organization
supporting Linux has matured more dramatically than most
outsiders realize. While Torvalds remains at its center, he
has ceded some control and accepted lots of help, thanks to
some prodding from individual programmers like McVoy and
some coaxing from tech giants whose fortunes have become
inextricably linked to Linux. One important step was the
move by IBM, Intel, and others to set up OSDL as the focal
point for accelerating Linux adoption.

Perhaps most surprising, the legal attacks on Linux over the
past year have unified the community. There continue to be
some internal tensions -- for instance, Linux backers fret
that different versions of the software will become
incompatible with one another. Yet a suit by SCO Group Inc.,
a software company that claims IBM handed some of SCO's
intellectual property to Linux, gave Linux aficionados the
motivation to coordinate their efforts as never before. Tech
companies have opened their checkbooks to pay for
administrative support, including a legal staff that scans
every stitch of code to make sure it can bear patent
scrutiny. Even Linux' original idealists, who have grumbled
at times about the corporatization of the community, put
their complaints on hold and rallied to defend their baby.
The SCO suit against IBM is slated for trial late this year.

Put it all together, and Linux has become the strongest
rival that Microsoft has ever faced. In servers, researcher
IDC predicts Linux' market share based on unit sales will
rise from 24% today to 33% in 2007, compared with 59% for
Windows -- essentially keeping Microsoft at its current
market share for the next three years and squeezing its
profit margins. That's because, for the first time, Linux is
taking a bite out of Windows, not just the other
alternatives, and is forcing Microsoft to offer discounts to
avoid losing sales. In a survey of business users by
Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ), 52% said they are now
replacing Windows servers with Linux. On the desktop side,
IDC sees Linux' share more than doubling, from 3% today to
6% in 2007, while Windows loses a bit of ground. IDC expects
the total market for Linux devices and software to jump from
$11 billion last year to $35.7 billion by 2008.

In response, Microsoft has launched a counterattack against
what it calls its No. 1 threat. The software giant's "Get
the Facts" publicity campaign claims that Windows is more
secure and less expensive to own than Linux. Microsoft has
notched some victories. The city government of Paris, for
instance, decided in October against a complete switchover
to Linux, citing the costs of such a change. Now that Linux
distributors are charging more for subscriptions, Microsoft
figures that it can use the same cost-benefit arguments that
helped bury old rivals, such as Netscape Communications
Corp. "It's getting to be much more like the old world
instead of the new world for us, and we know how to compete
with that kind of phenomenon," says Microsoft Chief
Executive Steve Ballmer.

But Ballmer may have a tough time persuading customers that
Windows is cheaper than Linux. It often isn't. With Windows,
end users pay an up-front fee that ranges from several
hundred dollars for a PC to several thousand for a server,
while there's no such charge for Linux. The total cost over
three years for a small server used by 30 people, including
licensing fees, support, and upgrade rights, would be about
$3,500 for Windows, compared with $2,400 for a Red Hat
subscription, say analysts. The situation where Microsoft
can have an edge is when a company already is using Windows.
Then, in some cases, it can be cheaper to upgrade to a newer
version of Microsoft's software, rather than replacing it
with Linux -- once you take into account the retraining
expenses. Analyst George Weiss of market researcher Gartner
Inc. says that Microsoft may trumpet those individual cases,
but "there's no study that says Windows will be a better
total cost of ownership in general."

Microsoft isn't shying away from brass-knuckle tactics in an
effort to win this battle. Several sources say that its
executives have been warning corporations that they're
taking a legal risk by using Linux. A spokesperson for one
company whose CEO met with Ballmer says the implication of
their conversation was that Microsoft is considering suing
outfits that use the software and claiming that it infringes
Microsoft patents. Although legal experts doubt Microsoft
would actually sue its own customers, Linux supporters say
such warnings are an effort to spread doubt and uncertainty.
"Our friends in Redmond [Wash.] are rattling their swords.
They're trying to scare people into not switching from
Windows to Linux," says Jack Messman, CEO of Linux
distributor Novell. Microsoft acknowledges discussing legal
risks with customers but denies trying to intimidate them.
It won't say whether it believes Linux infringes on its
patents.

COMMUNAL IMPULSES 
That Linux is more than holding its own against Microsoft's
onslaught suggests it could become a model for others in the
tech industry. Otherwise fierce competitors -- think IBM and
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) -- are demonstrating that they can
benefit from embracing the open-source philosophy of sharing
work. By collaborating on the operating system, they all get
a stable foundation on which to build tech projects and save
millions in programming costs. "Much software will be
developed this way. It's especially good for infrastructure
-- stuff that affects everybody," says Torvalds. "In the
long run, you can't sanely compete with the open-source
mentality."

Linux Inc. has become so mature that it's clear it could
continue to thrive even without Torvalds. Already his chief
lieutenant, Andrew Morton, shares leadership duties and
makes all the public appearances. From 1997 to 2003, when
Torvalds worked for chipmaker Transmeta Corp., putting out
Linux wasn't even his full-time job -- yet its market share
in servers rose from 6.8% to 24%. Plus, this isn't the army:
Programmers don't wait around for orders. Linux' legions
know how the development process works, and they just do it.
"I manage people, but not in the traditional sense," says
Torvalds. "I can't say, 'You do this because here's your
next paycheck.' It's more like we know what we want to do,
but we don't know how to do it. We try directions. Sometimes
somebody disagrees and has a vision. They go and sulk in
their corner for a year. Then they come back and say, 'I'll
show you it's much faster if you do it this way.' And
sometimes they're right."

This mix of commercial and communal impulses has its roots
in the early days of personal computing. Academics and
corporate researchers originally shared many of their
software innovations. But that started to change in the
1980s as the industry took shape. In response, programmer
Richard Stallman launched the Free Software movement. His
answer: the GNU operating system, modeled on Unix, to be
shared by a community of programmers. It was Torvalds who
came along with a piece of software called the kernel, which
is the control center of the operating system and
coordinates the work of other pieces, such as the software
that tells the printer to produce a page. Programmers called
the kernel "Linux," a contraction of Linus and Unix, and
Linux caught on as the name for the whole thing. Torvalds
decided the group's mascot should be a friendly penguin,
named Tux, partly because a pint-size Fairy penguin once
nibbled his finger at an Australian zoo.

Stallman is still an evangelist for free software, but with
his wild long hair and odd behavior, he doesn't fit in with
the suit-and-tie crowd. He doesn't even speak to Torvalds
anymore -- since Torvalds decided to use a piece of software
that wasn't open-source to help develop Linux. "The place he
wants to lead people is a mistake. It isn't to freedom,"
says Stallman of Torvalds. During speaking engagements,
Stallman often adopts the persona of "St. IGNUcius," donning
a robe and a halo made of a computer disk. Chris Wright, a
young programmer for OSDL, recalls a group dinner at a
restaurant where the trade group hosted Stallman. Wright was
impressed with Stallman's beliefs but put off by his style.
"He wanted to taste everybody's food, so it was a little
awkward," says Wright.

Torvalds proved to be just the guy to lead the Linux charge.
He was only a casual programmer in 1991 when he started
writing software to run on a PC. But after he posted the
first Linux code on the Internet for others to contribute
to, he got the knack for spotting quality and handling the
flow of fixes. Gradually, he developed a support
organization of volunteers.

Begun as a meritocracy, Linux continues to operate that way.
In a world where everybody can look at every bit of code
that is submitted, only the A+ stuff gets in and only the
best programmers rise to become Torvalds' top aides. "The
lieutenants get picked -- but not by me," explains Torvalds.
"Somebody who gets things done, and shows good taste --
people just start sending them suggestions and patches. I
didn't design it this way. It happens because this is the
way people work naturally."

One reason that Linux Inc. bears little resemblance to a
traditional company is that Torvalds has almost nothing in
common with classic, hard-driving, and autocratic
tech-industry leaders. He rarely appears in public and
largely lets other people set priorities for development.
Once others come up with improvements, he shepherds them
along. "Linus has power, but he doesn't have it by fiat,"
says Havoc Pennington, a Linux contributor who works for Red
Hat. "He has power because people trust him. As long as he
keeps making good decisions, people won't take it away from
him."

Yet for all of his seeming passivity, Torvalds is a strong
leader. He stays scrupulously neutral, never taking one
company's side over another. He focuses on the open-source
development process. There, he demands high-quality work.
Things must be just so, with the least amount of coding. As
a result, Linux has few errors that can be exploited by
virus writers. That gives it an edge on Windows, which has
become a favorite target of hackers -- largely because it's
so widely used, but also because it has vulnerabilities that
Linux doesn't. "He has set a compelling vision and inspired
people to follow it," says Larry Augustin, a venture
capitalist at Azure Capital Partners and an OSDL board
member: "It's leadership by example, rather than leadership
by hype."

Even today, Torvalds operates in a virtual world of e-mails
and Web sites. He works almost entirely from a roomy house
that sits on a wooded Oregon mountaintop and is decorated
with taxidermic specimens, including a piranha and a
crocodile. He gets up early, making strong cups of coffee
for himself and his wife, Tove, a former karate champion in
Finland. Then he settles in for hours of reviewing code and
snapping off e-mail messages in his basement office. It's
lined with science fiction and fantasy books, including
classics such as Dune and the Wheel of Time series. In the
afternoon, he coasts down the hill on his bicycle to a
quaint village, stops at a Peet's coffee shop for a latte or
Chai tea, and pumps back up the hill. Then he returns to his
computers.

Although Torvalds is physically near his comrades at OSDL,
he almost never sees them face to face. He visited the
organization's office only once in his first three months in
the Portland area, and he rarely meets with Morton, an
Aussie who lives in Silicon Valley. "It's a long-distance
mind-meld," says Morton. In a rare encounter last summer,
they shook hands and made small talk at a picnic. The Linux
community, Torvalds says, is like a huge spider web, or
better yet, multiple spider webs representing dozens of
related open-source projects. His office is "near where
those webs intersect."

The Linux development process begins and ends with the
programmers. While there are still some individual
volunteers and government agencies that chip in, more than
90% of the patches now come from employees at tech
companies. Many of those workers are formerly independent
aces who have been scooped up over the past few years. Some
of these people simply submit code, and others, called
maintainers, are in charge of improving specific functions.

>From there on, it's a continuous cycle. Individuals submit
patches; maintainers improve them. Then they're passed off
to Torvalds and Morton, who review the patches, ask for
improvements, and update the kernel. Every four to six
weeks, Torvalds releases a new test version so that
thousands of people around the world can probe it for flaws.
He puts out a major upgrade every three years or so. Unlike
at traditional software companies, there are no deadlines.
The Linux kernel is done when Torvalds decides it's ready.

Linux Inc. is a series of concentric circles radiating out
from Torvalds. In the first circle, you have Open Source
Development Labs. The top tech companies with a stake in
Linux -- including HP, IBM, and Intel -- have technical
people on the board of directors. The board sets priorities,
such as getting Linux running better for huge data centers
and desktop PCs. In addition, the board is responsible for
raising $10 million to protect customers from potential
intellectual-property claims.

TAKING THE SUBWAY 
The second circle is a dozen or so Linux distributors.
Spearheaded by Red Hat and Novell, this group also includes
such regional players as Red Flag Software in China and
MandrakeLinux in Europe. They pick up the latest version of
the kernel about once a year and package it with 1,000 or so
related open-source programs, including the GNOME
graphical-user interface, the Firefox browser, and the
OpenOffice desktop application suite.

The distributors race one another to be first out with Linux
updates, but their engineers spend most of their time on
projects they share with everybody else. For example, Novell
employs open-source pioneer Miguel de Icaza, who is both a
Novell vice-presi- dent and the leader of the Mono project
-- software for building applications to run on Linux. The
34-year-old Mexican coordinates 25 Novell employees plus
more than 300 other programmers, many of whom work for other
tech companies. So far, de Icaza says, there have been no
conflicts. His explanation: "Cooperating gets you further
along than screwing your neighbor."

These Linux companies have little in common with their
brethren from the dot-com boom. They're typically frugal.
Matthew J. Szulik, CEO of Red Hat, takes the subway rather
than a cab when he visits customers in New York and Boston.
And rather than being motivated by big money, Linux
programmers say their goal is making Linux an ever-bigger
force in computing. Red Hat's Pennington doesn't covet
expensive wheels, proudly pointing to his 2001 Toyota
Corolla in the parking lot, which he jokes is "fully
loaded."

For his part, Torvalds has been amply rewarded for his role,
but he's no Bill Gates billionaire. OSDL pays him a salary
of nearly $200,000. In addition, he sold initial public
offering shares that he got as gifts from a couple of Linux
companies, including VA Linux Systems. That helped him
afford his house and put money away for his daughters'
educations.

ALL-PURPOSE SYSTEM 
In Linux society, there's no bowing and scraping before the
rich and powerful. Executives and product managers at HP,
IBM, Intel, and Oracle (ORCL ) don't even try to pressure
Torvalds and Morton to further their interests. Instead,
their input goes through their engineers, who, as members of
the open-source community, submit patches for the kernel or
other pieces of Linux software.

The tech powerhouses have learned to play by new rules. You
can't meet in private, come up with new features, and then
drop massive changes on Torvalds. A handful of companies,
including Intel and Nokia Corp. (NOK ), learned this lesson
the hard way when they went about making Linux capable of
running telecom gear. About two dozen of their engineers
worked on the "carrier-grade" Linux project, and then, in
late 2002, they posted hundreds of thousands of lines of
code on a Web site. The response: outrage. "We were offended
by the whole process," says Alan Cox, a top kernel
programmer. The posting was quickly removed.

Still, the cultures of open-source and commercial software
are melding together. Red Hat used to scatter employees
around the world, the typical open-source approach. Now the
company brings its workers together so young programmers can
cross-pollinate with gray-haired veterans. It works. Not
only did 46-year-old Larry Woodman bond with 26-year-old Rik
van Riel by teaching him how to drive a car, but the two are
working in tandem on improvements to memory management in
Linux. "We complement each other," says Woodman.

These collaborations are turning Linux into an all-purpose
operating system. It's secure enough that Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory loads it not only on desktop and server
computers but also on supercomputers it uses to simulate the
aging of nuclear materials. "Linux is definitely more secure
than Windows," says Mark Seager, the lab's assistant
department head for advanced technology. "There aren't as
many ways to break the system." With the latest
improvements, Linux now works on servers with more than 128
processors and can run the largest databases. The newest
versions also have features, such as power management, that
make them more suitable for laptop PCs.

Linux is so solid that staid corporate purchasers are
adopting it aggressively for run-the-company applications.
Holcim Ltd. (HCMLY ), the Swiss cement giant, just switched
from Unix to Linux for some of its accounting,
manufacturing, and human-resource applications. The
attraction: 50% savings on hardware and 20% on software. "It
was a no-brainer to go with Linux," says Carl Wilson, chief
operations manager for the company's North American data
center.

Cost isn't the only reason that companies are switching to
Linux. The data processor Axciom Corp. recently shifted some
servers to the operating system, after using Unix in the
past. Alex Dietz, the company's chief information officer,
says he's thinking about replacing the Windows operating
system with Linux on the company's desktop computers. One
important reason: Axciom doesn't want to be too dependent on
Microsoft. "[Linux] has an innate guarantee that you won't
be held hostage," says Dietz.

Torvalds takes tremendous satisfaction in seeing his baby
grow up. "It's like a river. It starts off a bouncy small
stream and turns into a slower-moving big thing," he says.

Indeed, Linux Inc. has emerged as a model for collaborating
in a new way on software development, which could have
reverberations throughout the business world. Its essence is
captured in one of the mottoes of the open-source world:
Give a little, take a lot. In a business environment where
efficiency rules, that's a potent formula -- maybe even
strong enough to knock mighty Microsoft down a peg.



By Steve Hamm

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/