By Rachel Chalmers
A Q&A with Linux operating system founder Linus Torvalds started late on Tuesday afternoon because Torvalds had taken his children to see a live penguin on the trade show floor. What’s with the penguin, anyway, reporters wanted to know? There was not a lot of deep thought behind the penguin issue, Torvalds admitted. I wanted to have a logo and people thought it should be something staid and corporate, but I wanted something friendly. You’ll notice it’s not an ordinary penguin. It’s a FAT penguin. He noted that unlike ordinary corporate logos, the Linux penguin can be shown in groups to indicate clustering software, on ice skates playing hockey for a Canadian user group and so on. Can we stop talking about the penguin now? he implored.
The Finnish engineer, who now works for the enigmatic Santa Clara, California-based semiconductor company Transmeta Corp, didn’t want to spoil any of the technical suprprises saved up for his keynote presentation later this afternoon, so watch this space. He did say, however, that Linux users can expect progress on the wireless front, and soon. It strikes me as interesting, he explained. Wires in general are a pain in the neck. Whether anybody else wants wireless or not, I don’t much care. I’m installing a wireless network in my house because it’s something that strikes my fancy.
That amiably pragmatic attitude goes a long way towards explaining Torvalds’ success as benevolent despot of the Linux developer community. I don’t claim to be a visionary, he admits. I claim to be an engineer with an idea… I personally haven’t tried to capture anyone at all. I’ve tried to keep the political minefield really clear. I don’t know why it has worked but it has, and I don’t want to mess with it now. Compare that to the travails of the Mozilla project, whose affliction Torvalds analyzes as having been kept too close to the chest of Netscape. By contrast, Torvalds keeps relinquishing responsibility – for various subsystems, for clustering software and for the embedded market. But the more he tries to give credit away, the more celebrated his achievement becomes.
That said, not everyone is in love with Linux. When Amiga Corp announced that the next generation of its eponymous operating system would be based on Linux, die-hard Amiga users cried foul. Linux was too big, too unwieldy, poorly conceived. Torvalds is philosophical about the criticism. A lot of Amiga people were carrying a flame. They did not know where it would lead them, he muses, any choice would have been a disappointment. I personally think Amiga made the right choice, but of course I may be biased.
Only one issue gets the determinedly apolitical Torvalds out of conciliatory mode: cryptography. I think the widespread use of strong encryption is a good thing, and I think that when governments try to get their hands into that, that’s bad, he says. Otherwise, he maintains his even-handed demeanor. Even Microsoft badmouthing Linux doesn’t rile him. I think it’s fair enough, he says cheerfully, we certainly badmouth Microsoft products once in a while. As for the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), a uniform state law that will give unprecedented power to commercial software licensors like Microsoft, I don’t see it ever being enacted, Torvalds confesses, it reads like a fairly desperate plea for help. Under Torvald’s light touch, help is on the way, for Microsoft’s customers if not for the company itself.
