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This is the concluding article in a three-part series.
Article 1: Computer Control
Article 3: The Virtues of Resistance
The one unique benefit that was creating this enthusiasm was not that this stuff was better or faster or cheaper, although many will argue that it was all three of those things. The one unique benefit that the customer gets for the first time is control over the technology he's being asked to invest in.
—Bob Young, CEO of Red Hat Linux, as quoted in Glyn Moody's Rebel Code
Sometime around the turn of this year, IBM started running a series of television commercials featuring—for reasons not clear to me or, I suspect, to many other viewers—retired professional basketball players enacting brief allegorical dramas about business computing. George Gervin, a.k.a. the Iceman, is the coach of this team, and some of his players include Firewall (played convincingly by the now portly and indeed rather wall-ish Bill Laimbeer, once a Detroit Piston) and Middleware (Xavier McDaniel, formerly the intimidating X-Man, and somewhat thicker in the middle himself). But for me the most interesting member of this team is "acted" by Detlef Schrempf, one of the more recently retired of the bunch—he was playing in the NBA as recently as last season. As Schrempf's name perhaps indicates, he's no boy from the 'hood, but rather a Germ an import, one of the first European players to excel in the NBA. Schrempf, the only player in the commercials who gets to dunk—perhaps because he's the only one who still can—plays "Linux," and the commercials identify Linux as the team's new star. This preeminence is not unrelated to Linux's willingness to work for "peanuts," simply because "he loves the game."
The casting of Shrempf was a witty move by the makers of the commercials, because Linux (the real Linux) is a computer operating system that originated in Europe—specifically, in Finland. In the last decade it has risen from a fragmentary set of routines whose existence only a few dozen hackers knew of, and still fewer cared about, to an increasingly widely used and widely discussed alternative to Microsoft's Empire of Windows. And indeed, it still works for peanuts.
(Throughout this essay I will use the term "hackers" to refer to highly skilled people who mess around in the digital innards of computers because they love to, whether they get paid for it or not—that's how they refer to themselves. People who illegally "hack" into systems where they don't belong constitute a subset of this larger group.)
The story needs to be told in some detail, because the rise of Linux has serious implications for the future of computer technology—and, more to the point, the future of human beings' use of computer technology. The story goes beyond Linux itself; it is the story of "open-source software," and the open-source movement will, in the coming years, have a lot to say about the extent to which we use computer technology or it uses us.
Linux, or rather the first attempt at producing the "kernel"—the most elementary and universally necessary routines—of what is now Linux, was written in the latter part of 1991 by a student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds. Torvalds started to write the code in order to test a possible alternative for another OS called Minix, which had been created by a programmer named Andrew Tannenbaum as a teaching tool: along with an accompanying book, Minix helped computer science students understand how an OS works. For this purpose Minix seems to have been excellent, but students who learned Minix often experimented with it to see if they could improve it and make it more functional for a wider variety of purposes. Linus Torvalds was one such student.
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