Linus Torvalds' double life

By Andy Walker, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

To look at Linus Torvalds, you'd never know he leads a double life.

In person he is a 29-year-old bookish programmer whose life got caught in the bright lights of the giga-traffic on the Information Superhighway.

On the Internet he is a player in the myriad of rumors and innuendoes stemming from his latest project at the top secret Transmeta Corporation in California's Silicon Valley suburb of Santa Clara.

When this reporter found him, he was sitting on a sofa in the press lounge of the Association of Information and Image Management conference held in Atlanta. Earlier that day, he'd sat on a panel that debated his home-written operating system Linux.

He'd charmed the audience by sparring - at times maliciously -- with Jim Ewel, program manager for Microsoft's Windows 2000. That's the company's replacement for the Windows NT operating system.

Asked if he'd consider an interview, he shrugged: "Sure." He had an interview with CNN coming up, but he had an hour to kill. First, though, some lunch in the speaker's prep room.

His story is the stuff of dreams, for basement dwelling geeks. Like many success stories his life was broadsided by a series of events that caught him by surprise.

Torvalds' claim to fame is the latest challenger to Microsoft's dominance in the operating system business.

In the summer of 1991, Torvalds wrote his own operating system called Linux (Torvalds pronounces it: LYNN-ucks) while he was a graduate student at the University of Helsinki.

He posted the program to a server at the nearby Helsinki University of Technology and the computer community started to take notice.

He wrote it for fun, he claims. "I wanted to have a project - I wanted to do some programming because that is what I did. I wanted a Unix clone."

Linux is an offshoot of Unix, a 30-year-old server operating system originally developed by Bell Labs. It runs on many of the computers that run the Internet. To the home user, Unix is unfriendly and obscure. To academics and computer scientists, it is the pillar of their computing world.

In eight years, Linux has gone from a university graduate project to a viable operating system that is installed, by Torvalds' estimates, on 10 million computers. Though he admits other attempted counts put the number at anywhere from eight million to 25 million installations.

Torvalds may have been the originator of the software, but it was built by a disparate global group of Linux devotees who donated their time and talents.

The Linux organization is made up of people "that have proven themselves. That people trust. It is a respect-ocracy," said Torvalds.

To call the group of Linux authors an organization is oxymoronic. "It's informal. It certainly has its rules. They are not written down," said Torvalds.

Development is done across the Internet and it is rare to see Linuxians in a room together.

"For Linux, it has always worked like that. So everybody's used to development on the Net," said Torvalds. "When you get together you discuss computers but it tends to be more like brainstorming and like getting drunk and having fun."

Torvalds, who counts his father, grandfather and Einstein, among his heroes, is the technical lead on Linux.

"I do some development usually in key areas where I want to make sure that the basics of the kernel" -- the heart of an operating system -- "is under my very strict control," he said. "But most of the kernel is developed by others and I have key people who have their own areas they are specializing in like device drivers but also networking and things like that."

Torvalds makes the final decisions on what code is added to each version of the software, which is distributed for free on the Internet.

Companies like Red Hat Software and Caldera Systems distribute commercial versions of the operating system on CD-ROM. For around $60, the CD contains Linux, utilities and an installation interface. The source code, the software equivalent of sentences in a novel, is open for the world to see. This open source approach follows the tradition that Unix laid out.

Linux has been a hobbyist operating system for most of its life. Programmers and server administrators are its biggest fans, while corporate information technology managers saw it as an unsupported rogue operating system.

It was legitimized last year when software company Informix released a version of their database for Linux.

"A year ago Linux was technically good but it wasn't psychology accepted," said Torvalds. "So what you had was a lot of companies that were interested in Linux but very few were prepared to take a step ...so then Informix eventually just said ok we'll do this. They actually announced that they would ship it and one week later (Informix competitor) Oracle did the same...a lot of people said FINALLY!"

Since then, other milestones have been significant.

Dell, IBM and Compaq began shipping of preinstalled versions of Linux on new computers.

Ottawa-based Corel shipped a free version of their WordPerfect Office suite for the rogue OS. They also announced a user-friendly, easy to install interface for Linux, to be rolled out in the fall.

LinuxWorld, the first mega-Linux conference was attend by big guns like Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett Packard in March.

Torvalds sees a day when Linux will become a consumer desktop operating system that will rival Microsoft's Windows franchise. For now he says, 'I don't think I keep Bill Gates awake at night."

Torvalds is confident that Linux will go mainstream.

"These things take time," he said. "Judging by gut feeling, in a year or two you have all the implications that you would expect, and even then the inertia to change (among computer users) is fairly strong."

Several developments have to happen for Linux to become consumerized.

"Once you have pre-installs, applications and you have a nice desktop you're starting to get there," he said. "In order for people to actually switch you have to have some reason."

Torvalds believes that reason to switch lies in Linux's origin as a server operating system. He believes Windows is fine when used to dial into the Internet through a modem, but is handicapped when it's "a node" - or a permanently Internet connected computer through high speed Internet connection services.

"Once you're actually a real node instead of being kind of a client suddenly Windows isn't that attractive and Unix is strong in that," he explained.

Part of Linux's success has been that it is distributed for free. Torvalds equates a free operating system with a basic human right.

"If you look at the UN, everybody has the right to a roof over their head. Everybody has a right to food or things like that. It's kind of cheesy to compare that everybody has a right to use an operating system, but I think if you have a computer it's kind of true...like phones it should be cheap enough that you can afford."

Then, he added quirkily, "And you can pay extra if you want 1-900 numbers and have phone sex, whatever."

Speaking of sex, Torvalds says he didn't get much in the early days of Linux.

"I wrote it over a year, mostly over a summer. I basically ate slept and programmed. Girlfriends? No."

He says he has groupies, "if you count the people that want an autograph." He's no Tom Jones though. "Nobody throws their underwear at me," he said with a laugh.

He is married, with two children. And he frequently takes his family to conferences when he speaks and includes a week in his itinerary to tour the city where the conference is held.

Since Linux is free, he makes no money directly from it, but the exposure he got from it drew the attention of Transmeta, a mysterious Silicon Valley company where he's been working as a programmer for two years.

What he can say about the company is limited.

"They're not a very forthcoming company. You can search on the Net and find lots of rumors, including alien technology," said Torvalds, who had to sign a lengthy non-disclosure agreement just to evaluate a job opportunity with them.

The company has a Web page, which says: "This web page is not here yet." In the notes in the page's source code it says: "There are no secret messages in the source code to this web page. There are no tyops (sic) in this web page."

Someone at Transmeta has a sense of humor, including Torvalds.

"I can neither deny nor confirm the rumor that we're working with the Alsatians doing a laser gun," he said with a wry grin.

The rumors are distributed on an internal mailing list at Transmeta, "People read it for comic relief," he said.

The most pervasive rumors suggest that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen backs Transmeta. It may also be developing a microprocessor chip.

According to Salon magazine, "There is some hard evidence that Transmeta is working on chip designs for graphics processing. Transmeta is a member of VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, as well as AGP-IF, the Accelerated Graphics Port Implementers Forum."

Whatever the start-up company is doing, it won't have a product for about a year, according to Salon.

"You should assume that all of (the rumors) are wrong," said Torvalds, "but you shouldn't take that for granted either. Maybe somebody has it right on."

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