This year’s Millennium Technology Prize, the “Nobel” of the technology world, has for the first time been shared between the two nominees. Stem-cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, will each receive €600,000. Linux underlies Google, Facebook and Amazon, but unlike commercial rivals Windows and Mac OS, Linux is open-source, free, and anyone can improve it. Jacob Aron talked to Torvalds in advance of the prize announcement.
Read more: “Superstars of technology: The Millennium prizewinners”
You’re known for creating the world’s most widely used piece of open-source software, Linux. How is it different?
There are so many differences. There’s the fact that especially over the last 10 years we’ve tried hard to make Linux portable so it runs on anything from cellphones to supercomputers, and most people are probably familiar with the Android operating system, which uses Linux. People are also using Linux when they look at Google, Facebook or Amazon.
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When I started, it was for my enjoyment. At some point I realised that I wanted to make it available on the internet. I was not that aware of the open-source movement, and I used a non-open-source licence that didn’t allow people to freely copy Linux. I had a friend who introduced me to the discussion.
So how does “open source” work in practice?
Instead of trying to control a project, you allow everybody to be part of the community and encourage them to make changes. The only real rule is you have to make those changes available to others. It turns out to be a wonderful model for development because, especially for Linux, there are many different people with different things they want to do. Having thousands of people involved means you get a very well-rounded system.
Did you think Linux would become so popular?
Hell, no. I think it was very healthy for the project that even today my time frame is a couple of weeks, or months, instead of this vision of where I want things to be in 10 years and how I’m going to take over the world.
Do you ever wish it was still just you?
No, I really don’t. It can be chaotic, but at the same time very lively. There are a lot of smart people and I like the heated discussions, even when people start cursing. I really enjoy the whole open source model very much because of the social side. Some people do it for the technology and that’s how I started, but I do think that a lot of people end up being involved because it is a fun community. I think it’s a prime example of a modern day guild where people work in a very social setting.
Are there other reasons for getting involved?
Part of the reason the community is so nice is this goal of sharing, and even when people are difficult, we still have over-arching goals. I wouldn’t say moral goals, but some people see it as a way to improve the world. I think the most common reason is selfishness – in a good way – because they’re solving a problem for themselves. I think that’s very healthy. If your only goal is to try to improve the world, that’s not sustainable in the long run.
“The most common reason people get involved is selfishness – in a good way”
Do you ever wish you had become a Bill Gates?
No. I’m not a poor person sitting in a dank basement coding away, I get paid a good salary and I have a lot of fun doing it. In many ways the comparison with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs doesn’t work because if I hadn’t made it open source, Linux would never have become as big as it is. Bill Gates is clearly a genius and knew how to program, but what he did was business and that was never what I was interested in. So the reason I’ve done the technical side is because that’s the part I really like doing, and I’m well enough off that I don’t have to worry about money.
Linux has a passionate following, but has never been widely used on people’s desktops. Why?
The desktop computer is a hard nut to crack. People want to connect a hundred different devices to do banking, gaming and so on. So the desktop needs a lot more applications than servers or even mobiles do. The other issue is that most people using desktops don’t want to know about computers. That means selling computers with a pre-installed operating system, as Google did with Android on smartphones. You can buy computers with Linux but they are few and far between.
Why should people try Linux?
I don’t want to try to push or convince people. The thing about Linux is that it is absolutely free – it is something that you can get into and try out fairly easily. Linux tends to be so efficient that some people got started by just installing it on an old machine. For many people that’s where it stays. The problem is that it’s slightly different and if you’re more interested in just using computers, Linux may not be the right choice.
How did you feel being nominated for the prestigious ? If you win next week, will it help Linux?
I was pretty excited. I don’t get so many prizes that I would think it is boring. The main thing the prize would mean is one less thing to worry about. The Linux Foundation allowed me to not have to worry about anything but Linux. I’m not in it to make money, but I won’t have to worry about my kids going to some expensive US university if I win the prize. I also hope this results in people reading about Linux and realising, hey, I can try this out.
What about the future of Linux?
I don’t tend to think in market terms. When I think about the changes we’re likely to hit, one of the big things for Linux is the hardware. When I see somebody making a suggestion for improvement, I think “how does this work in a world 10 years from now?” If you make the wrong choices and it turns out it really doesn’t scale up when you use 200 central processing units, then 10 years from now when everybody has a lot of CPUs, you might be up shit creek.
What about Raspberry Pi, a Linux-based computer costing $25? Will that change things?
What’s interesting about Raspberry Pi is that it’s so cheap almost anybody can buy it as a throwaway – throwaway in the very good sense that it could get people involved in computers who otherwise wouldn’t be. For a lot of people, it will be a toy gathering dust, but if 1 per cent of the people who buy it are introduced to computers and embedded programs, that’s huge. It can get people into the mindset of using a computer to do everyday jobs that even five years ago it would have been ridiculous to use a computer for because they were big and expensive. With Pi, you can say, I wouldn’t use a real computer for this, but maybe it can control my water heater.
Is a future where homes are run by computer only possible with open source? If Raspberry Pi had to run Windows, would it be too expensive?
Yes. Open source is a very powerful way to try something new. The thing about trying something new is that 999 out of 1000 cases will fail. Having this easy entry into trying something new means having one case where it works is very good. Raspberry Pi is a way to allow experimentation on an even smaller scale because you have the hardware, too. When you aim for that price you can’t afford not to use a free, open operating system.
If you come up with a good idea, can you open source it for others to contribute to?
Open source is not a way to get other people to do your work for you, but it is a way to maybe get the project bigger than you thought. Every open-source project I’ve seen has been about someone saying, I’m doing this because it is fun, interesting and I need it. Then it exploded as other people started getting involved.
Profile
Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists who were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. He credits his grandfather, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, with sparking his interest in computers when he bought one of the first home computers around 1980. Torvalds created Linux more than 20 years ago as a personal project and in excess of half of the web’s servers now use it. He works for the Linux Foundation and lives in Portland, Oregon
