Linus Torvalds is an unlikely giant killer. At age 28, he stands about 5 feet 10 inches tall with a square, solid build and an open face.
I saw him recently at the Open Source in Business Forum event, which was sponsored by a group of Stanford University engineering students. The event got under way an hour late, but Torvalds, dressed in blue jeans and denim shirt, made good use of the time. He greeted the student organizers as if they were old acquaintances and chatted with the assembled students and users of Linux, an open source code operating system that is beginning to look like a permanent part of the landscape. Torvalds wrote the core of Linux while a student at the University of Helsinki.
At Stanford, he seemed to spend more time listening than talking, which struck me as odd for someone of his stature in an age when heads of billion-dollar companies lobby for keynotes at trade show conferences.
Associates say Torvalds' prominence is more than an accident of fate. He is a brilliant programmer who knows thousands of lines of code in the Linux kernel backward and forward. He can edit a patch for splicing into the kernel in the e-mail message in which it arrives -- without consulting Linux reference code.
The purpose of the Stanford forum was to discuss how to build a successful business around software that is community property rather than proprietary property. But I heard precious little about business models during that hourlong wait. Instead, old acquaintances were renewed. Newcomers were welcomed.
The event bore all the earmarks of a tribal gathering, an air that was reinforced when Torvalds' wife, Tove, arranged herself and their blond children on the floor before the front row. Halfway through the proceedings, the youngest Torvalds let out a cry -- probably in exasperation at yet another computer acronym -- and Linus casually exited the panel to help rearrange his family in a more distant corner of the hall. No one considered this unusual because the Torvalds treated it as part of everyday life.
That's why I say Torvalds, the elder, is such an unlikely giant killer. There is a decided normalcy to his demeanor. He displays no aggressive instincts. He made no bad-humored cracks about Microsoft. There was no dogma that he was trying to get out or group ideology that he adhered to. As the panel entered a somewhat self-congratulatory phase, Torvalds sounded a contrarian note. "I don't say open source code is one architecture, that it is going to take over. I don't believe that nor would I want that."
Rather, he thinks open source development occurs where a programming challenge exists and needs to be solved. "If I had already had a Unix that did for me what I wanted it to do [run on cheap Intel hardware, for instance], I wouldn't have had that itch to scratch," he said. Instead, he created the Linux kernel.
Thus far, open source programmers with an itch to scratch have come up with many key building blocks of the Internet -- the Apache Web server, SendMail, etc. But Torvalds said he does not expect open source developers to always focus on infrastructure. "There's no reason why open source can't be other things," such as business applications. "But we have to walk before we run. Unless we have an infrastructure, we have nothing on which to build."
And therein lies the pitfall for the commercial giants, including Microsoft. An infrastructure is being created that will make it easier for a second generation of open source developers to follow, creating applications and end-user software. Creating open source is not a take-on-the-competition process. Rather, projects keep building up the framework under leadership such as Torvalds'. It's little wonder the giants sit and watch the process with discomfort.
