Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [22]
CHAPTER 4
Patterns of Online Collaboration
On August 26,1991, at 2:12 am, a 21-year-old Finnish programming student named Linus Torvalds posted a short note to an online forum for programmers. It read, in part:
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones . . . I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
Just 14 minutes later, another user responded with the words “Tell us more!” and asked several questions. Nearly six weeks later, on October 5, Torvalds posted a second note, announcing that the code for his operating system—soon to be dubbed Linux—was now publicly available. He wrote in the announcement:
This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I’ve enjouyed doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I’m looking forward to any comments you might have.
Torvalds was an unknown, a student working in relative isolation at the University of Helsinki, not part of some hip Silicon Valley startup company. Still, what he’d announced was interesting to many hackers. The operating system is the nerve center of a computer, the piece that makes the rest of it tick. Handing a hardcore hacker the code for an operating system is like giving an artist the keys to the Sistine Chapel and asking them to redecorate. Shortly after Torvalds’s post, a Linux activists mailing list was formed, and just three months later the mailing list had grown to 196 members.
Torvalds not only made the code for his operating system freely available, he also encouraged other programmers to email him code for possible incorporation into Linux. By doing this, Torvalds initiated the formation and rapid growth of a community of Linux developers—programmers who collectively helped him improve Linux. By March of 1994, 80 people were named as contributors in the Linux Credits file, and people were contributing code at an astronomical rate. In 1995, the company Red Hat formed, marketing one of the first commercially successful versions of Linux; in 1999, Red Hat went public on he New York Stock Exchange, with a market value of 3 billion dollars by the end of its first day of trading. By early 2008, the Linux kernel—the core part of the Linux operating system—contained nearly 9 million lines of code, written by a collaboration of more than 1,000 people. It is one of the most complex engineering artifacts ever constructed.
Linux has become so widespread that it’s easy to take it for granted. Although Microsoft Windows remains the dominant operating system for home and office use, in many other areas Linux surpasses it. Companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon all use enormous Linux clusters, containing tens or hundreds of thousands of computers. In Hollywood animation and visual effects companies, Linux is the dominant operating system, surpassing Windows and MacOS and playing a major role at Pixar, Dreamworks, and Industrial Light and Magic. In the consumer electronics industry, companies such as Sony, Nokia, and Motorola use Linux in everything from mobile phones to televisions. This ubiquity makes it easy to forget how remarkable the story of Linux is. Imagine that in 1991 a 21-year-old Finnish programming student had approached you, telling you that he’d written the core of an operating system and was planning to release the code, and oh, by the way, he