The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him

jeremy · 06-16-2015, 11:55 AM

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The conversation, combined with Linus Torvalds’s aggression behind the wheel, makes this sunny afternoon drive suddenly feel all too serious. Torvalds—the grand ruler of all geeks—does not drive like a geek. He plasters his foot to the pedal of a yellow Mercedes convertible with its “DAD OF 3” license plate as we rip around a corner on a Portland, Ore., freeway. My body smears across the passenger door. “There is no concrete plan of action if I die,” Torvalds yells to me over the wind and the traffic. “But that would have been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago. People would have panicked. Now I think they’d work everything out in a couple of months.”

It’s a morbid but important discussion. Torvalds released the Linux operating system from his college dorm room in Finland in 1991. Since then, the software has taken over the world. Huge swaths of the Internet—including the servers of Google, Amazon.com, and Facebook—run on Linux. More than a billion Android smartphones and tablets run on Linux, as do billions upon billions of everything from appliances and medical devices right on up to cars and rockets. While Linux is open-source, which allows people to change it as they please, Torvalds remains the lone official arbiter of the software, guiding how Linux evolves. When it comes to the software that runs just about everything, Torvalds is The Decider.

What’s more, Torvalds may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years. He didn’t invent open-source software, but through Linux he unleashed the full power of the idea. Torvalds has proven that open-source software can be quicker to build, better, and more popular than proprietary products. The result of all this is that open-source software has overtaken proprietary code as the standard for new products, and the price of software overall has plummeted. Torvalds has, in effect, been as instrumental in retooling the production lines of the modern economy as Henry Ford was 100 years earlier.

It’s absurd that so much power has collected in one man. To look and speak with Torvalds is to not expect much. He’s 5-feet, ho-hum tall with a paunch, John Lennon-style round glasses, and gleaming, square-shaped teeth. It’s cheap and easy but true to say his body type and gait resemble that of Tux, the penguin mascot of Linux. Torvalds works at home, and during his busiest times—preparing a new version of Linux for release—he might stay inside for a whole week. “It embarrasses my daughters,” he says. “I’ll show up in the kitchen in a bathrobe, and her friends will ask, ‘What kind of hobo is your dad?’”

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--jeremy