Today, a parable about giving versus selling. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
My computer-wise friends have
all been at me to do a program about the computer
operating system Linux. That might strike
you as odd, but Linux has almost religious
implications among computer people. It has become an
emblem of the altruism to which so much of the
computer underworld aspires. Linux is an operating
system, like those used to run Windows or Macintosh
machines. Linux, however, is available to anyone,
free of charge.
Back in the '60s, Denis Ritchie at Bell Labs
developed one of the first operating systems and
called it UNIX. UNIX was robust, and it's still used
in many places, but not without modification. For it
comes out of the computer's Jurassic Era. It was not
the sort of thing you'd run on a PC.
In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Helsinki,
developed the primary program, called a
kernel, for a new PC operating system. He
based it on UNIX and adapted his own first name to
give it the UNIX-sounding name of Linux. It
was just a lark; he never meant to make a pile of
money. He just meant to create an operating system
with the solidity of UNIX that would work on PCs.
Six years earlier, Richard Stallman at MIT formed a
group called GNU to promote the creation of free
software. Stallman has been trying to replace the
word copyright with the word
copyleft. By that he means legal protection
for giving ideas away -- preventing others from
selling them for profit. Since Stallman had been
developing software for a UNIX platform, he enlisted
Torvalds to join with GNU in making Linux and its
source code available free of charge.
By then, Microsoft was the primary seller of PC
operating systems. But much of the work done on PCs
doesn't need Windows compatibility. Linux caught on
in a way that surprised even Torvalds. Today, upwards
of twenty million people use Linux for servers,
calculation, data acquisition, and much more. Much of
the software you use on your PC is available in both
Windows and Linux versions.
Users praise Linux for its robust stability. It's so
stable because Torvalds makes his code available for
anyone to see. He hears from the best computer people
all over the world. They find bugs and think of
improvements. In addition to Linux, GNU provides a
vast amount of commercial-quality software: the
Fortran, C, and PERL programming languages -- even
the Netscape browser. And Netscape shares that
user-shaped robustness with Linux. This openness has
caught on, and Linux remains the centerpiece of open
software.
And what about Torvalds? Does he kick himself for not
becoming the new Bill Gates? Not at all, because
cream floats and the world is more just than
we might think. Torvalds can write his own ticket. Go
to the web and meet his wife and young daughter --
catch the aura of confidence and contentment around
this young idealist. The same subtlety that gave us
Linux also shows the way in which rewards really do
follow accomplishment.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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