Reading 11: King of the Ball

Most tech stories follow a normal march towards glory. Plenty of people seek money or fame, but Linus Torvalds’ motivations remained pure when developing one of the most influential projects ever created. Despite personal hardships, an aggressive industry, and unexpected success, Linus led Linux to serve as a testament to how innovation, community, and timing can converge to create something monumental.

When a personal project transitions into a worldwide phenomenon overnight, there are bound to be growing pains. My favorite, rather ridiculous growing pain is the online fan reactions Linus describes from 1996. When news of Linus and his wife expecting a child was leaked, Linus explains how vocal Linux community members expected some planning as to how he would handle his new obligations and Linux. Later that year, when the time came for Linus to graduate and get a job, he received similar reactions from fans concerned over the project’s future. The reactions of community members hold substantial influence in an open-source community, and Linus having to deal with potential backlash over standard life events surely cannot have been easy. Even though Linus found some concerns valid, he clearly held that he would have given up the project at any time had his priorities changed. These concerns were dwelled with confidence, time, and plenty of community updates.

Linus certainly disagreed with his peers in Silicon Valley as well. I very much enjoyed reading about Linus’s meeting with Steve Jobs because both figures seem to be polar opposites. Steve Jobs, so motivated by fortune and the future, being unable to reach the reigns of a promising programmer is a comical image to me. Between his conversation and Bill Joy’s demonstration of “open source” licensing, there is a clear disconnect between Linus and his peers. Linus’s lack of financial motivation was relatively unheard of, and it led to Linus maintaining vision for Linux alongside the community.

Despite all of this, Linus is not impervious. His success created an ego that he satisfied by flaming developers on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. While a lot more mellow nowadays, these rants were so colorful that they gained eternal internet fame. There is even a GitHub project that analyzes the “hate” rating of his comments (https://github.com/corollari/linusrants, it’s very funny).

Fortunate circumstances certainly played some part in Linux’s success, but the clear winners are Linus and the bazaar. Linus created a powerful standard for how software can become accessible, profitable, and above all else, fun. Plenty of tech giants have the opportunity to solve problems, but it is seldom that you find a group selfless enough to do it for free. He truly seems to be a once-in-a-generation hacker.