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2005年03月20日

Tovalds vs. Gates

I recently read, on loan from my father, the book "Just for Fun" by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and co-written by David Diamond. It reads like a cross between an autobiography and an extended magazine interview as the two individuals collaborate to tell Torvalds' story.

All of the book is written in first person with most of it apparently from Torvalds' perspective but interspersed with Diamond's narrative based on his encounters with Torvalds' as they worked together on the book. It makes for a comfortable, casual read and though Diamond's comments add detail to the picture you form of Torvalds, you cannot help but feel Diamond is slightly taking advantage of Torvalds' fame and using the chance to brag about the relationship he formed with the computer icon.

The Linux operating system is a powerful, industrial-strength platform used extensively in the computer industry. It was created single-handedly by Torvalds (though now developed collectively by thousands of developers all over the world) and is given away free to any who choose to use it. Both the computer this review is being written on and the web server on which you are reading it run Linux. Though "altruistic genius" might be a fitting epithet for Torvalds, the title of the book explains Torvalds' true motivation in life. Fun is the reason Torvalds created Linux and the reason he agreed to write a book with Diamond.

"Just for Fun" follows Torvalds' awkward and eccentric childhood through the development of Linux and even looks to the future with a few predictions solicited by Diamond. You discover that many of the attributes associated with Torvalds, like his purported communistic tendencies or disdain for Microsoft, are ascribed by his zealous fans and in no way reflect his real views. He has, in fact, a very healthy attitude towards money and uses Microsoft products on a regular basis. He even thanks the corporation for Word and PowerPoint.

Torvalds' also speaks on copyright and intellectual property issues with an incisive perspective that explains the problems affecting so many and understood by so few. One of his most salient points is summarized in this quote: "Generally speaking, I view copyrights from two perspectives. Say you have a person who earns $50 a month. Should you expect him or her to pay $250 for software? I don't think it's immoral for that person to illegally copy the software and spend that five months' worth of salary on food."

The book is surprisingly gripping and very entertaining. Amongst the trivia, you will learn how the name "Linux" was really established and the real details of his conflicted relationship with Andrew Tannenbaum, who's Minix operating system was supplanted by Linux or with Richard Stallman who created GNU and insists Linux be called "GNU Linux". Geeks especially will relate to the excitement Torvalds feels around his work and passion. The rest of the population could gain, by reading this book, an understanding of technology and many of the issues surrounding it to which geeks are customarily the only ones privy.

In order to keep the universal karma in balance, I felt compelled to follow Torvalds' book by Gates' book. I dug out my unread copy of "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates also proffered, incidentally, by my father. This book, published in 1995, is much older than the former.

Though written in the same casual first person style as "Just for Fun", this book is strictly from Gates' perspective and, as the title suggests, offers predictions about the future. Since we now live in the future this book talks about, it is entertaining to compare reality today with the ten-year-old prognostication of Bill Gates. We also get a taste of the conceptually parallel, economically divergent formative years Gates experienced as compared to Torvalds.

Both Torvalds and Gates were exposed to computers at an early age and both discovered the immense power afforded to them by programming these general purpose machines. They both became involved with computers at a time when few people had any idea what they were doing and they focused their passions long enough to ride the PC revolution into fame an notoriety - of completely different flavours.

Torvalds began Linux as a way to understand the 386 processor. Writing an operating system was a learning project. Gates, on the other hand, saw the commercial potential of virtually everything he found in a computer.

In order to pay for computer time in high school, he and Paul Allen got entry-level computer programming jobs. They created their first company "Traf-O-Data" to exploit the power of the 8008 processor to analyze traffic measurements. In 1975, they wrote BASIC for the Altair and that was the basis of the company that became Microsoft. It was in 1981 when the IBM PC was launched offering MS-DOS, called PC-DOS by IBM and licensed from Microsoft that Microsoft took off. Gates was really good with computers, but even better with business.

The most interesting chapters in Gates' book are the early ones describing his history and chapter 10 where he describes the super high tech home he was building at the time. The rest of the book is dedicated to his predictions about the Information and Technology industry which are simultaneously prescient and quaintly anachronistic.

The prescient part involves predictions like the Internet "will be our photo album, our diary, our boom box" foreshadowing in one sentence online galleries, blogs, and Napster and it's descendants. Considering this book was written about the same time Netscape was created, this showed impressive foresight.

The quaintly anachronistic part involves referring to the Internet exclusively as "the highway" (supposing it was not clear at the time that the Internet would be the universal network of the future) and prefacing almost every paragraph with something like "The highway will allow us to..." He also talks a lot about the revolutionary new and still expensive ISDN technology that would bring high speed access to our homes.

I still find it hard to decide who is the bigger geek. Torvalds had is asexual youth with all his emotional needs satisfied by his interaction with the computer, but Gates had his own uncanny ability for temperance as exemplified in this passage about a long distance relationship:

We'd find a film that was playing at about the same time in both our cities. We'd drive to our respective theaters, chatting on our cellular phones. We'd watch the movie, and on the way home, we'd use our cellular phones again to discuss the show. In the future this sort of "virtual dating" will be better because the movie watching could be combined with a videoconference.

I, for one, am glad we have such a bright future. But before we poke too much ridicule at the man, one could search for a lifetime and never find someone who so deftly used his computer knowledge to advance his chances with the opposite sex. Perhaps it is Bill who deserves the last laugh:

One of the programs I wrote was the one that scheduled students in classes. I surreptitiously added a few instructions and found myself nearly the only guy in a class full of girls.

Overall, the book is entertaining in parts, but not nearly as intriguing as Torvalds. Read the first few chapters to understand one of the richest men of all time. Then put the book down so you can get back to enjoying all the wonderful things Gates predicted.

Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York: HarperCollins, 2001

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Posted by William at 2005年03月20日 05:00

Comments

Posted by: Dan at 2005年03月28日 01:23

Posted by: William at 2005年03月31日 03:05