Any comments, suggestions and bug reports
regarding the subtitle.
E-mail to: geek@geekbone.org

I was at the Agenda 2000

and uh, one of the people who was there
was Craig Mundie,

who is some kind of
high mucky muck at Microsoft,

I think uh, vice-president of consumer products
or something like that.

And uh, I hadn't actually met him

I, I, I, uh, bumped in to him in an,
in an elevator... in an elevator

And uh, I looked at his badge and said,
"Oh, I see you work for Microsoft."

And he looked back to me and said,
"Oh, yeah and what do you do?"

And I thought he seemed just a sort of a tad dismissive

I mean, here's the archetypal, you know,
guy in a suit

looking at a scruffy hacker

And so I gave him the thousand
yard stare and said,

"I'm your worst nightmare."

Wonderview Productions
PRESENTS

A
J.T.S. Moore
FILM

REVOLUTION OS

For most its short, but colorful history,

the computer industry has been dominated

by the Windows operating system.

But that could soon change,

as Windows faces a strong challenge from Linux

Silicon Valley has long been the place

to develop new technology,

start new companies and get really rich.

Now The Valley is the front line in a revolution

fighting for that most
politically incorrect of ideas:

individual freedom

Day and night,
a loose confederation of

hackers and programmers zaps bits pieces of

computer code around the world as it builds the tools

to set computer users free

using open information and
the free exchange of technology

to achieve its goals.

This revolution began in the 1980's with

the Free Software Movement and GNU project.

And now is most commonly associated

with Linux and the Open Source Movement.

What is Linux?

We do have one sector that taking off today.

It is the Linux-related sector.

And I thought this might be
a good opportunity to say,

"What is Linux?"

And I'll answer this question for you.

Many of you probably already know,

but
There are 12 million users out there

A computer Operating System
developed by hundreds of

programmers collaborating on the Internet

A challenge to Microsoft Windows NT

Very popular for its speed

and so this's what the craze is about

To kind of explain what Linux is you have to

explain what an Operating System is

And... the thing about Operating System is
you, I mean...

you're never ever supposed to see it.

Because...

nobody really uses an Operating System,

people use... programs... on their computer

And the only mission in life

of an operating system is to help
those programs run.

So an operating system never does
anything on its own

It's only waiting for the programs to

ask for certain resources

or ask for the programs to

connect them to the outside world.

And then the operating system
comes, steps in and then

tries to make it easy for people
to write programs

And, What is Open Source?

Open Source is a way for people to collaborate

on software without being encumbered
by all of the problems of intellectual property,

having to negotiate contracts every time
you buy a piece of software,

have a lot of lawyers involved.

In general, we just wanna get software to work

and we want be able to have

people contribute fixes to that, etc..

So we sort of sacrifice some of

the intellectual property rights

and just let the whole world
use the software

Before there could be Linux

There was Richard Stallman
and the Free Software Movement.

They think of Richard Stallman as the...

great philosopher, right.

And think of me as the engineer

Richard Stallman is the founding father of
the Free Software Movement.

Through his efforts to build the
GNU Operating System.

He created the legal, philosophical and
technological foundation

for the Free Software Movement.

Without these contributions,

it's unlikely that Linux and Open Source

would have evolved in to their current forms today

I joined the
MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971,

I joined... a thriving community of hackers,

people who loved programming,

loved exploring the what they could do
with computers.

And they had developed
a complete Operating System,

entirely written there.

And I became one of the team, that

continued to improve the Operating System,
adding new capabilities

That was my job, and I loved it, we all loved it.
That's why we were doing it.

And [clears throat] we called our system

"the Incompatible Time Sharing System"

which is the example of the

playful spirit

which defines a hacker.

Hackers are people who enjoy
playful cleverness.

Well, it first started going wrong

as the outside world started pressuring us
to have passwords.

We didn't have any passwords
on our computer.

And the reason was that the hackers

who'd originally designed the system

realized that passwords were a way
the administrators could control all the users.

And they didn't want to build tools

you know, locks and keys for
the administrators to control them,

so they just didn't do it.
They left that out

And we had the philosophy
that whoever sitting at the computer

should be able to do whatever he wants

and somebody else who was there yesterday
shouldn't be controlling what you do today

When they put passwords onto one of
the machines at MIT

I and bunch of other hackers didn't like it,

I decided to try a subversive sort of hack.
[clears throat]

I figured out how to decode the passwords,

so by looking the database of encoded passwords

I could figure out what each person
would actually type to login

And so I sent messages to people, saying,

"Hello? I see that you've
chosen the password mumble,

whatever it was.
How about if you do as I do

just type Enter for your password

it's much shorter, much easier to type".

And... of course with this message I was

implicitly telling them
the security was really just a joke.

Anyway, but in addition
I was letting them in on this hack.

And eventually, A fifth of all
users on that computer joined me

in using just Enter as their passwords.

[ Where did the ideas that lead to what is now
called Open Source world?

How did that begin? Who began that? ]

It actually began with the start
of computers because at that time

software was just passed around between people

And I think it was only like in the
lates 70's or early 80's

That people started really closing up
their software,

And saying, "No, you can never
get a look at the source code.

You can't change the software
even if it's necessary

for you to fix it, for your own application"

And... um, you can actually blame
some of that on Microsoft,

They are one of the real pioneers
of the proprietary software model.

In the mid 1970's, a group of hackers

and computer hobbyist in Silicon Valley
formed the "Homebrew Computer Club".

In the club January 31, 1976 newsletter,

Bill Gates of the recently formed Microsoft,

wrote an open letter to the community

where he made a point by point argument for
the relatively new concept of proprietary software

up to that point, the practice of computer users
had been to freely pass around software

with not much thought given to
its ownership

Known as An Open Letter to Hobbyists,
Bill Gates writes,

"To me the most critical thing
in the hobby market right now

is the lack of good software courses,
books and software itself.

Without good software and an owner
who understands programming,

A hobby computer is wasted.

Will quality software be written
for the hobby market?

Gates goes on to write,
"The feedback we have gotten from

the hundreds of people who say they are
using BASIC has all been positive.

Two surprising things are apparent, however.

1) Most of these "users" never
bought BASIC, and

2) The amount of royalties we have received
from sales to hobbyists

makes the time spent on of Altair BASIC
worth less than 2 dollars an hour

Why is this?

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,

most of you steal your software.

Hardware must be paid for but software
is something to share.

Who cares if the people who worked
on it get paid?

Is this fair?

One thing you don't do by stealing software

is get back at MITS for some problem
you may have had

MITS doesn't make money selling software.

One thing you do do is prevent
good software from being written.

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?

What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming,

finding all bugs, documenting his product
and distribute it for free?

The fact is,

no one besides us has invested a lot of money
in hobby software.

What about the guys who resell Altair BASIC?

Aren't they making money on hobby software?

Yes, but those who have been
reported to us may lose in the end.

They are the ones who give
hobbyists a bad name,

and should be kicked out of any
club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from
anyone who wants to pay up,

or has a suggestion or comment.

Signed Bill Gates, General partner, Micro-Soft.

In the late 70's and early 1980's,
Richard Stallman was

doing Artificial Intelligence research and coding

at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Richard had a number of negative experiences

during that period which soured him

on the whole idea of commercial software.

[ such as? ]

uh... some company wanted to work on and
wanted to fix was locked up.

and he couldn't get the company on the code to let him fix it

even though it would have been to their advantage to do so.

And that put me into a moral dilemma, you see?

Because to get one of the modern computers
of the day, which was the early 80's,

you would have to get a proprietory
operating system.

The developers of those systems
didn't share with other people,

Instead they tried to control the users,

dominate the users, restrict them.

Say, if to get the system,

you have to sign a promise you won't
share with anybody else.

And to me that was essentially a promise
to be a bad person,

to betray the rest of the world,

cut myself off from society
from a cooperating community.

And I had already experienced what happened
when other people did that to us,

when they refused to share with us.

because they had signed these contracts.

And it hurt the whole lab,

it kept us from doing useful things before.

So I just wasn't going to do that.

I thought,"This is wrong!
I am not going to live this way"

And from experiences like this
he developed a profound hostility

to the idea of
intellectual property and software.

He eventually acted this out
by founding the Free Software Foundation.

So, I looked for another alternative
and I realized:

I was an operating system developer.

If I were to develop another operating system.

And then as the author,
encourage everyone to share it.

Say, everyone, " You come and get it,
use this, form a new community"

Not only could I gave myself a way
to keep using computers without

betraying other people,
but I'd give it to everybody else, too.

Everybody would have a
way out of that moral dilemma

And so I realized this was
what I had to do with my life.

I actually began the project in January of 1984.

That's when I resigned for my job at MIT

to start developing the GNU operating system.

Now I should explain the name GNU is a hack.

Because it's a recursive acronym.

It stands for "GNU's Not Unix".

You see so the "G" in "GNU" stands for "GNU".

And what the name means is

I was developing a system that was like
the Unix operating system,

but was not the Unix operating system.

It was a different system.

We would have to write it completely
from scratch

because Unix was proprietory.

We were forbidden to share Unix,

We couldn't use Unix.
It was useless for a community.

So we had to write a replacement for it.

Throughout the 1980s,

as Richard Stallman was building the GNU project,

computer scientists from
the University of California at Berkeley

were developing their own free
operating system.

Known as Berkeley Unix, or BSD,

it was based upon the Unix kernel
which had been licensed from AT&T.

However, due to legal problems with AT&T
and fragmentation of the source code,

hackers and other non-institutional users
were slow to adopt it

Well, Unix consisted of a large number of
separate programs

that communicated with each other.

So we just had to replace these programs
one by one.

So what I started doing was
writing a replacement for one program,

and then another, and then another,

and then people started joining me,

because I published an announcement
inviting other people to join me

to help write these programs.

And uh... and by around 1991,
we had replaced practically all of them.

[ What were some of the programs that you ... ]

Well... we had to... to have a complete system,

you need to have a kernel, which is the program that

allocates resources to all the other programs,

you need a compiler, which translates a program

from readable source code
that programmers can understand into numbers,

mysterious numbers
that the computer can actually run.

you need other programs
that go with the compiler to help do this job.

you need a debugger.

you need a text editor.

you need text formatters.

you need mailers...

you need lots and lots of things.

There are hundreds of programs
in the Unix-like operating system.

I saw Stallman's announcement.

Actually I met him in February of 1987.

He came to give a five-day tutorial
on Emacs at our company.

And during the day he would explain

new ways to think about Emacs

and ways to extend it, enhance it,
and to use the Emacs source code

uh, for better or worse.

But in the evening,
he was busily working on this compiler,

and he had not yet released it to the public,

so he was uh, being a little bit uh,
careful about

who, who got to see the source code.

But I was very eager,
and when he first announced it in June,

I downloaded it immediately.

I, I played with it.

I got some, some pointers from him.

And when I sent the source code back to him,

he was very,

uh, actually amazed that how quickly
I was able to ramp up on his technology.

Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,

Whenever we worked on something
at Stanford or in the university,

we would get, mostly at the time

we were working off machines
from Digital Equipment or Sun, mostly Sun.

Whenever we would get a Sun machine,

the first thing we would do is
we would spend literally days

downloading GNU free software from the Internet,

building it and installing it on that Sun machine.

The crucial thing about GNU is that
it's free software.

And Free Software refers not to price,
but to freedom.

So think of free speech, not free beer.

The freedoms that I am talking about

are the freedoms to make changes if you want to,

or hire somebody else to make changes for you

if you're using a software for your business,

to redistribute copies,
to share with other people,

and to make improvements and publish them

so that other people can
get the benefit of them, too.

And those are the freedoms that distinguish
free software from non-free software.

These are the freedoms that
enable people to form a community.

If you don't have all these freedoms,

you're being divided and
dominated by somebody.

My first experience contributing to free software

came in late 1989, early 1990.

I was working as a graduate student
at Stanford University

on Computer Aided Design tools.

One of the pieces I needed was a tool

called a parser generator.

Well, the Free Software Foundation

under Richard Stallman
created a great tool called "bison".

I needed a tool that worked with C++.
Bison worked with C.

I modified bison to create something
called "bison++".

And it's a tremendous feeling of empowerment

be able to take a piece of software that was available

and create what you needed
in a very short piece of time by modifying it.

I put it back on the Internet

and I was amazed at the number of people

that picked it up and started using it.

In fact, I remember going to, uh job interviews,

I, at various times, considered
just going out getting a job.

And I'd gone to a job interview.

And I was talking to one of the people,

and I started asking them about what tools they used,

and they said, "Gee, we used bison++!"

and I said, "Oh, I am the author of bison++!"

Free Software generally does have a copyright.

It does have an owner.

And it has a license.

It is not public domain.

If we put the software in the public domain,

somebody else would be able to make
a little bit of changes

and turn that into a proprietory software package,

which means that
the users would be running our software,

but they wouldn't have freedom to cooperate and share.

To prevent that, we use a technique called "Copyleft".

The idea of Copyleft is that
it's "Copyright" flipped over.

And what we do is, we say,

this software is copyrighted

and we, the authors give you permission
to redistribute copies,

we give you permission to change,

we give you permission to add to it.

But when you redistribute it,

it has to be under these terms,
no more and no less.

So that whoever gets it from you

also gets the freedom to cooperate
with other people, if he wants to.

And then, in this way everywhere the software goes,

the freedom goes, too.

And it becomes an inalienable right

to cooperate with other people and form a community.

[ And so, what is that? the license?
what was that... ]

Well, Copyleft being a general idea,

in order to use it, you have to have specific example.

The specific example we use for
most GNU software packages

is the GNU General Public License,

a particular document and legalese
which accomplishes this job.

A lot of other people use that same license,
for example,

Linus Torvalds uses that license for Linux as well.

Well, the license I use is the
GNU General Public License.

That's the one Richard Stallman wrote.

And I think it is really astounding contribution.

Uh, it's one of the few software licenses
that was written

from the standpoint of the community rather than

from the standpoint of um, protecting a company

or um, as is the case with MIT and BSD license

performing the goals of
a government grant program.

Uh, and the GPL is really unique in that.

It's not just a license.
It's a whole philosophy that,

I think, motivated the open source definition.

I don't hide that a lot of what I do came from Stallman.

A crucial step in the growth of GNU/Linux
and the Free Software movement

was the creation of businesses
based upon the software and philosophy.

Grown zero for the beginning of
the business face

was the Electronics Research Lab
at Stanford University.

Known as ERL, the lab was the place for the first GNU

and Linux business founder inspiration.

So right here was where ERL was.

That would have been the entrance
over there next to the uh,

electrical engineering McCullough building.

As you walk in, you come in,
you walk down the hallway, down here.

My office would have been about, about here.

and then right across the hall,
from that was Michael Tiemann's office.

Michael Tiemann took uh.. and
started a company, Cygnus Software

with the idea was to sell consulting
and services around the GNU Free Software

and, well Michael's done very well with Cygnus.

Well uh, I spend a lot of
time working out uh,

how we were going to make money

and in the original GNU manifesto

which is the last chapter
of the GNU Emacs manual.

Stallman proposed a number of different

possible ways to make money.

Form the beginning of the
Free Software movement

I had the idea that there's

room in it for business to be done.

One of the advantages of Free Software is that, there's

a free market for any kind of service or support.

So if you are using software in your business,

and you want good support,

you have a choice of people to go to for it,

you have a choice of businesses... that

are in the business of
providing you with support.

So they are going to have to in general give you

good support or you go to somebody else.

With proprietory software,

support is a monopoly, there is one company,

typically, that has the source code

and only they can give you support

so typically, you are at the mercy of a monopoly.

That's the case, for example with Microsoft.

So no wonder the support is so bad.

The benefits of Free Software were

tremendous but the cost of supporting it internally

uh, and made managers very very nervous and

so the fundamental idea I had was
if we can build a model

that could deliver two to four times the support

and uh, and uh, and hand holding capability

that an internal engineer could provide.

And we could do it at 1/2 to 1/4 of the cost

that would meet the test of wether or not

people would actually buy.

And by about the Fall of that year, we had

all the things worked out about who

needed on the technical team, what

the terms the sale would be, what

the key price point were, and we

actually received our incorporation in Nov of 1989.

One of the most difficult things in starting our company

was actually finding a name for it.

I explained this to one of my friends

"we're having difficulty"

and he returned an e-mail message

that basically just had a bunch of words
with the name "GNU" in it.

And "Cygnus" was the one that
looked least obnoxious and least obscene.

I can say very clearly that Cygnus

was the first business that specialized in Free Software.

Cygnus supported Free Software,

filled a very essential niche because
we had this great software,

you could get it for nothing but
you couldn't get support - they made their money

by charging for support.

The GNU project started by building a toolkit,

a basic development tool such as
a C compiler, a debugger, a text-editor,

and uh, other necessary apparatus.

And their intention was eventually to
develop a kernel to sit underneath those

and be the center of the operating system.

By about 1990 they had successfully
developed that toolkit,

and it was in wide use on great many variants of Unix.

But there was still no free kernel.

The kernel happened to be
one of the last things we started to do

and we had started it not long before.

And that's when Linus Torvalds came along.

"Lin-us" or "Line-us"? What's the exact,
do you prefer the pronunciation?

um.. When I speak Swedish it's "Lee-nus";

when I speak Finnish it's "Leen-ous";

when I speak English it's "Line-us".

And I really don't care how people pronounce my name.

But "Linux" is always "Linux".

He developed a kernel, and got it working
faster than we got ours working,

and got it to work very nicely and solidly.

His kernel is called "Linux".

The initial goal was my very personal goal

to be able to run a similar environment on my computer

that I had grown used to at, at the university computers.

And I could not find anything that suited me for that.

So having been doing computers for all my life basically.

At that point I decided that I'll do my own.

Most of the inspiration early on came from, from SunOS

which was what um,
I was using at the university at the time.

[ Which University? ]

University of Helsinki in Finland.

From 1991 to about 1993 was really

I guess the infancy period of Linux.

That was when it was still only alpha or beta quality;

it was relatively unstable.

Although, even then it was a good deal more stable

than a lot of what are now called
"production" operating systems.

Linus used the traditional
tried-and-true method of writing one program

that does the job,

and he got it to work.

quickly in fact faster than
I would have thought was possible.

The term for it is "monolithic",

which means that basically
the OS itself is one entity, indivisible.

uh, while in the microkernel,

the, the operating system kernel is actually

uh, just a collection of servers that

do different things and then they have a common protocol

for doing communication between themselves.

[ So why is that... the GNU project that's had
so much lead-time, that's been doing this,

Why...Why is it that he was able to kinda
come in at the tail end so to speak ]

Well we actually started the
GNU Hurd not long before he started Linux.

And it happened though we chose a design
that's a very advanced design

in terms of the power gives you

but also turns out to be very hard to debug.

We decided to divide up the kernel
which traditionally had been one program,

to divide it up into a lot of smaller programs

that would send messages to
each other asynchronously to, to communicate.

The problem is that, that style of programming

has a great deal of potential for bugs,

which are often very hard to
figure out because they depend on...

does this program send this message
before or after this one sends that message...

And the result was:
it took us years to get the thing to work.

[ What is Linux's relationship to the GNU project? ]

Well there's relationships to GNU
on kind of multiple levels.

One is just the philosophical level of thinking that

"making your source open is a good idea".

When Linus developed the kernel
he wasn't doing it for the GNU project.

He did it independently.

And he released it independently
and we didn't know about it.

But some of the people who did know about it

decided to look for what else they could find

to put together with that kernel to
make a whole system.

They looked around, and lo and behold
everything they needed was already available.

They looked around, and lo and behold
everything they needed was already available.

"What good fortune!" they thought.

But actually there was no chance about it.

They had found all the pieces of the
GNU system which was missing just the kernel,

so when they put all that together

really they were fitting
Linux into the gap in the GNU system.

But they didn't know that.

There's a lot of these programs

um, done by the Free Softwares Foundation,

and done by other people like Linux.

And there's a symbiosis between
Linux and the programs

that the programs run on Linux and at the same time

and they take the advantage of Linux as a platform,

while Linux takes the advantage of the programs

by just being able to use them.

[ What...What programs? ]

umm...

The main one is actually the GNU C Compiler.

Which... Without a C compiler
it would not have been possible

to make Linux or most of the open progress available.

Linux uses the GPL,

and I agree with a kind of philosophy behind the GPL.

That said the GPL itself is not a very pretty document

which is probably just because
no lawyerese can ever be very pretty.

I'd been playing around with Linux for actually

late '92 or early '93 for about a year.

before I decided that it was to the point
where actually had everything that I needed

to really replace a Sun Workstation.

And I was looking for a way to
have a Unix workstation at home

at the time we used Sun Sparc Stations
in the office at Stanford.

Those machines cost us about 7,000 dollars.

Now I desperately wanted a Unix machine at home!

There's always a this thought
you get as you get a graduate student

"Gee... if I could work at home!

Then I would be so much more productive,

I would graduate sooner because
I would finish my thesis sooner"

Well, Well, is it true? Well, you can judge.

You know most people end up spending a lot of their time

becoming more productive so that

they ever actually worked on their thesis
they'll finish it in a day.

It takes a while sometimes.

So I decided that I wanted a Unix machine at home.

And I went out there I was able to
use Linux together with the PC.

For about 2,000 dollars, I put together a system.

That was one and a half to two times faster

than that 7,000 dollars Sun Sparc Station.

It was absolutely amazing.

I had one and a half to two times the speed,

at a third to fourth the price.

Light bulbs went off.

I knew there was an opportunity here.

This was the chance to really do something
better than what Sun has done

around open source and Linux.

I called it Linux originally as working name.

And that was just because Linus

and the it has to be there.

It's Unix. It's like a law.

And...what happened was that...

I initially thought that I can't call it Linux publicly,

because it is just too egotistical.

And that was before I had a big ego. Right?

They thought they were taking a whole bunch
of components putting them around Linux

So they ended up calling the whole thing
"A Linux System"

and somehow that term caught on.

And the result is

there are now ten million people using

this variant of the GNU system...

the GNU/Linux operating system.

And most of them don't know it.

[ Some people advocate it be described as GNU/Linux.

I mean what's your thought on
that? I would say, justify or... ]

Well, I think it's justified but it is justified
if you actually make GNU distribution of Linux.

The same way that I think that Red Hat Linux
is fine or SuSE Linux, or Debian Linux.

Uh, because if you actually make your
own distribution of Linux

You get to name the thing.

But calling Linux in general "GNU Linux"
I think, is just ridiculous.

I got involved in Fall '93.

Because I was sent a copy of the first CD-ROM
commercial Linux distribution,

which was called Yggdrasi produced by Adam Richter.

And I got a copy because...

I had been myself writing Free Software for
a long time since the early 80's.

I was actually one of the
early GNU contributors myself.

And I was absolutely astonished,

I was completely astonished.

Because I've been a software engineer
for nearly 15 years at that point.

And according to all the rules I knew...

about controlling complexity,
keeping a project group small,

having closely managed objectives.

Linux should have been a disaster, and it wasn't.

Instead, it was something wonderful,

and I was determined to figure out
how they were getting a way with that.

In order for Linux to grow beyond
the world of the computer programmer

It needed a use and application
that made it a must-have technology

That threshold was crossed

with the development of a program
that made complex websites possible

That program is the Apache web server.

The killer app of Linux was undoubtedly
the Apache web server.

If you look at the history of Linux,

the adoption curve of Linux and
the adoption curve of the Internet

the adoption curve of Linux and
the adoption curve of the Internet

exactly track each other.

1993, which was when the Apache
web server project really got started,

was also the beginnings of the popular ISP explosion

when the Internet first became a mass market commodity

and the idea of web-based electronic commerce

and, and mass communication became real.

I think it was one of the first applications
that caused people to go

"Well, if I install Linux."

I get some tangible benefit from doing so, right?

I mean, clearly there were a lot of
interesting applications on Linux

at, at the time, this being maybe
two or three years ago,

when the root thing really started to take off

but there wasn't a driving, you know,

you could almost say business case

for someone to use Linux versus using NT

until, I think, Apache and
a lot of the things that plugged into Apache

enhanced Apache

I mean, when you want to go out and build..
go out to build a server farm

It was much more cost effective

cost effective

real dollar returns to build it on Linux and Apache
than was to build it on IIS and NT

even if it meant that you have to
spend a little bit of money

to train your staff to learn how to use that or

to find people who were people who
were knowledgeable.

But the good news was that

the knowledge wasn't very expensive

because there were all those college students out there

who'd been using Linux for a long time
and were very familiar with it.

If you look at the trend curves in web servers

Apache has steadily been gaining
a market share ever since

it's up to something like 66% now

It's steadily clobbered
all of the closed source competition

And that's because it's more reliable
it's more flexible, it's more extensible

It does what webmasters actually need

and the combination of Apache and Linux

found its way into a great many commercial shops.

Essentially, Apache became the application
that motivated Internet service providers

and e-commerce companies to choose Linux
over Microsoft's Windows.

It would probably runs best on Linux and on FreeBSD

and the reason is the
communities around those operating systems

are also the communities that
contribute the most back to Apache, right?

And there were also the operating systems
that Internet service providers

started using very heavily as well

and Internet service providers really liked Apache

because it allowed them to do

a lot of different things
that some of the commercial web servers didn't

such as the ability to host more than
one web site on a single box, which clearly

if you are an ISP and you would have 40,000 users

and they all want their web site

it's gonna be pretty important to you.

one of the key factors in the growth of Linux was

the creation of companies that
specialized in the distribution

and support of the Operating System itself

Among these companies,
Red Hat Software is the best known.

Red Hat started as a product of Marc Ewing

while he was working at IBM.

He wanted a little better Linux distribution

he started playing around,

found out he uh, he spent more time
maintaining his Linux distribution

than he did uh,
than he did working on his new project.

So he uh, sort of started the distribution himself

He met up with Bob Young,

who at the time was running company called
ACC Bookstore

which was a mail-order PC Unix uh, catalog

And Bob kind of knew he wanted something,

you know, more his own to market,

rather than reselling other people's products

And he was fairly good at marketing, and...

Mark knew he needed some marketing help

because he was very good at the technical parts,
so they kinda got together

I started working with Red Hat in May of 1995,
basically right out of NC State.

along with Eric Troan who, me and him
combined make up employees #4 and #5.

We actually reported to work in an apartment
that Mark Ewing used to live in

We took it over as kind of
the development part of Red Hat software

and stayed that way till about November of 1995 when...

a toilet we had in the apartment kind of exploded,

flooded our downstairs neighbor

and she got little upset and...

the apartment folks found out
we were running a business there

instead of actually living there the same time

So they decided to throw us out.

So at that point, we had about a week to go find

our first office, which we did

and get ourselves moved in a hurry

We started going in again '95 or so
to the venture capital firms,

asking, saying, there's something happening here.

There's a great business opportunity,

to build the next Sun for open source.

Well, the venture capitalists looked at this and said

"Gee, you are selling systems

the software is free. This is kind of scary.

We're not sure that we want to put money in. And...

by the way, we funded other systems companies

and it hasn't really panned out. We are scared."

I came to the US about 3 years ago,

and the reason really was that I'd been spending

like 6 or 7 years at Helsinki University.

and decide it was time to see the real world
and not just university life.

Especially this area had a lot of the most
interesting work being done.

So I just decided that...

let's try to move half way across the world,

and give this a try.

And it's turned out pretty well.

[ Ah...you see this as temporary or long term? ]

Well, we saw it as temporary at first.

And I think it's certainly looking like
it's turning into long term.

Our youngest daughter is
both US and Finnish citizen,

because she was born here

and the older one is speaking
both Swedish and English, so...

The next major event was one that
I had directed hand in.

I wrote a paper, called
"The Cathedral & the Bazaar".

which was my observations,
my anthropological analysis

of what it was that made
the open source world work.

We didn't call it that then. We were still
using the term "Free Software" primarily.

So it was my observation of
what made the Free Software world work

and why we were able to
produce extremely high quality software

in spite of constantly violating all of
the standard rules of software engineering

In that paper, I was setting up a contrast

between two different styles of development,

two opposed styles of development.

One, which is the
conventional closed development style,

which I called the "Cathedral" style.

In that one, you have
tight specification of objectives.

Small project groups which are run
in a fairly hierarchical authoritarian manner.

And you have long release intervals

On the other hand,what I identified
is happening in the Linux world

was a much more peer to peer decentralized,
market or bazaar-like style,

which has a very short release intervals

and constant solicitation of feedback from people
who are formally outside of the project.

A very intense peer review process.

And the startling thing was that the more I looked at this,

the more it seemed that trading away
all the supposed advantages

of conventional closed development,

for that one single advantage
of massive independent peer review

actually seemed to win,
actually seemed to get you good results.

The reason Netscape is important is

that they were the first large company
to participate in open source.

We had Cygnus providing support,

but we didn't really have much business.

And Netscape went open source essentially
as a way to fight Microsoft.

Which was giving away Internet Explorer,

but not letting anyone else have the source code,
not letting companies collaborate.

Working as part of the sales force, I got a bit of,

I got a good idea of.. of why people bought our software

and what it took to make our software successful
in the marketplace against competitive products.

However, the problem was,

we were seeing, as that, as time went on,

our software was uh,

being competed against by other
people's software, particularly Microsoft's

and as time went on, the price of our software had to drop

because other people were giving their software away

at no charge or at little charge.

Now the real problem was that they feared

Microsoft would achieve a monopoly lock on the browser market

and they would then use that monopoly lock to

pervert actually,

the HTTP and HTML standards that the web depends on.

And once they had turned those
standards in to lock in devices,

they could then use that control
to drive Netscape out of the server market,

which was where it was making its real money.

My concern was that as time went on,

Netscape's business would be threatened,

by the fact that we didn't have enough people
to do what we needed to do as a company

in order to keep our software viable in the marketplace.

The Netscape release happened in early 1998.

And uh, I was told later, I had no idea at the time,

that it came about as a direct result of

the right people having read
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar",
the paper by Eric Raymond,

was a significant influence on
Netscape's decision to release source code.

It came as a complete shock to me.

I wasn't really ready for the thought

that I was changing the world even by accident.

However he was not by any means
the only influence on that decision.

Uh, and not necessarily the most important one,

when all is said and done.

As I said, Netscape,

Netscape had already been talking about
releasing source code for quite some time before

anyone ever heard of Eric's paper.

Linux Congress in early 1997,

which was the first place that I gave that paper.

And one of the people who heard it was
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates.

And uh, he thought it was pretty intriguing

and he asked me to give it at
his first PERL conference, which was uh..

later that year, in Fall of 97.

And apparently what happened, I was told later,

although I had no idea that this was happening at the time,

uh is that some people from Netscape actually
heard the paper at the PERL conference

and took those ideas back to Netscape and
they kind of lit a fire there.

The role of my paper was essentially
to make the internal case at Netscape, uh

to make the business case for
why Netscape should release its source code.

The paper was called
"Netscape Source Code As Netscape Product".

uh.. a strange title,
essentially what the title meant was that

In my opinion we needed to

think of source code not just as something
that was used in creating our products,

but as something that was a product in its own right.

Something that customers might use, other people might use.

I then looked at what the business models might be

if we released source code for our products.

How would we license them?

How do we sell products in this environment?

Then I looked at the competition, particularly Microsoft.

What would they be likely to do
if we released source code?

Was there some way they could
use our source code against us?

I used Eric's paper as an example of
how distributed development could work,

how a company could develop software not
just using their own people,

but also working with people on the Internet.

And that's why I included a reference to
Eric's paper in my paper.

Once my paper was circulated,

the people who read my paper would naturally enough

find a reference to Eric's paper
and read that as well.

[ And who was involved in
making that happen at Netscape? ]

Primarily the person who made the
actual decision was Jim Barksdale.

And this turned out to be important later.

That our big win, the big score

that gave us mainstream
visibility and credibility with investors

came not because of bottom up evangelism
from a bunch of engineers,

but because one strategist at the top

saw the potential power of this method and

then essentially imposed that vision
on everyone underneath him.

When I completed the paper,
I first gave a copy to Mark Andreessen,

who was co-founder of Netscape and
was at the time one of,

on the senior management team at Netscape.

Mark then gave a copy of the paper to several
other people within Netscape management,

including Jim Barksdale.

I'm not sure exactly when Jim and
the other senior managers

made the actual decision,

I believe it was in early January sometime.

Netscape actually announced that it was gonna
release the source code on Jan 22nd,

the same time it was going to give
Communicator away for free.

When Netscape decided to release the source code,

people sort of got a wake up notice and said

"Hey, maybe there is something to this idea
of releasing source code

and doing development with people
outside your company."

So Netscape's decision brought a lot of
public attention to the idea of Free Software,

what became known as Open Source,

and brought a lot of attention to
the Linux operating system,

which was one of the most prominent examples of
Open Source software at that time.

This is our first office, Mountain View, California.

We moved here in early 1995.

This is 4,000 square feet.

It was an incredible leap of faith for us to
move out and take the company to our own office.

Now what's really important about this place

is that this is the office
where the term "Open Source" was invented.

If you walk in to an executive's office
and say "Free Software",

OK, If you're lucky, the response
you'll get is something like,

"hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be
cheap, shoddy, worthless."

Uh, and if you're not lucky,
it has associations with, uh.

with the Free Software Foundation's
wholesale attack on intellectual property rights,

which regardless of what
you think about the ethics of that,

it's lousy marketing, it's not something
that businesses want to hear.

So Eric Raymond knew there was a problem.

We'd been calling this Free Software,

but people took the term "Free"
and associated with "Free of charge",

they thought they couldn't make money or couldn't sell,

which is exactly the wrong concept.

We wanted to get across the idea the software
was open and that the source code was available.

Very important pieces.

We had this meeting at the VA offices
in Mountain View, where Eric,

myself, and Christine Peterson from Foresight Institute
joined us as well as some other people.

Christine Peterson was there by phone. uh..

Jon "Mad dog" Hall was also there by phone. uh..

And then Todd Anderson, who later worked for
SuSE for a while was there.

Sam Ockman who now runs Penguin Computing was there.

He was uh.. He was an employee of VA at the time

Well, we came up with the concept of Open Source,

we called Linus in fact and asked Linus if he liked it.

He was interested, He liked it.

Eventually we came up with something that replaced "Free Software".

That was the beginning of Open Source.

[ How did you chose words "Open Source"? ]

You know, I think Christine Peterson was
the person who really came up with the idea.

Uh, we wanted, again, the idea
that the source code was out there and it was open.

There weren't many choices.

Well, since the fist three recipients have
spoken for the Open Source movement,

I think I should speak about
the Free Software movement.

The Open Source movement,
focuses on practical advantages

that you can get by having a community of users

who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software.

I agree completely with the points they make about that.

The reason why my views are different,
while I am in the Free Software movement

rather than the Open Source movement,

is that I believe there's something
more important at stake.

That freedom to cooperate with other people,
freedom to have a community...

is important for our quality of life.

It's important for having a good society
that we can live in.

And that that is in my view, even more important
than having powerful and reliable software.

But I think some of the people in
the Free Software camp...

are a little scared by the commercialization.

And uh, you know,
of course a rebel is put off by success.

uh.. I think that commercialization is very important.

We want to mainstream this software,

and I work with Richard Stallman
who's the gray haired man of Free Software,

uh, on a regular basis, and I don't feel

I have any philosophical differences.

me as author the Open Source definition and

he is originator of free software as an organized thing,

except for one thing.
Richard thinks that all software should be free,

and I think that free software and
non-free software should coexist.

That's the only difference we have.

Uh, we decided early on that what we needed,

a..a definition, we needed a kind of
meta-license to define the term "Open Source".

a, a definition, we needed a kind of
meta-license to define the term "Open Source".

And what we came up with is a document called
"The Open Source Definition".

It's derived from the Debian Free Software guidelines
that were originally written by Bruce Parens.

I'd written the original draft of that, uh,

discussed it for a month with the Debian developers

Debian is a Linux distribution

And made it their project policy

And Eric and I decided to relabel

what we'd written for Debian

as The Open Source definition

and to say Open Source is a software

that gives you a list of nine rights

which is in the Open Source definition.

The first right is Free Redistribution

This doesn't mean Free as in no price

It means liberty

Um, you have to be free to redistribute

your software to someone else

And actually no price is a side effect

You can charge for that redistribution or not

It has to come with source code

So that someone can maintain a program.

If they go from a PC to a Mac for example

they can change the software.

Derived Works have to be possible

If someone has to improve your program

um, they should be able to distribute the result

uh, There is a provision about integrity

of the author's source code

which says that the author can sort of
maintain their honor

and if you make a change

you might have to change the name of the program

or mark out your change very clearly

so that your change doesn't reflect on the author

There is no discrimination against people or groups.

Uh, the example I usually use is

You can't stop an abortion clinic

or an anti-abortion activist from using the software

There is no discrimination against fields of endeavor

And that means the software has to be usable

in a business as well as in a school

The license has to be distributable

In other words

I have to be able to give that license to someone

and that license then should work

if that someone gives it to yet a third person

The license can't be specific to a product

in other words

if I distribute my software on a Red Hat system

the license can't say

you can't distribute this on a SuSE or Debian system

The license can't contaminate other software

So if I distribute this on a CD with another program

It can't say that other program must be free

otherwise you can't distribute my software

And then the only other part of

the Open Source definition

is a list of licenses that were accepted

And the ones that we started with were the GPL

which was actually the example for a lot of

what's in the Open Source definition in the BSD license

because software for BSD system pre-existed Linux

I think the next moment that I thought
was really pivotal

was when the database vendors flipped over

which happened about three months sooner

than I expected to

and actually happened in late July early August

commitments to do one ports from Oracle and

and Sybase and the other key database vendors.

[ And why was that critical? ]

because we knew that in order for

the open source story to be credible

and especially in order for the Linux story
to be credible,

we'd have to get commitments from
independent software vendors

to do ports of their applications to these platforms

and I was actually kind of worried

I thought that we were in a window of vulnerability

between the time that we announced
the open source campaign

and the database vendors flipped over

that was the point in which hostile action

by Microsoft or other close-source software companies

that was the point in which

a serious marketing bleeds might have suck us

but once the big database vendors flipped over

that opened the way for other ISVs

that started the snow ball effect going

Every six months or so

I would come back to the venture capitalists

I would show them the new numbers

showing more and more people adopting Linux

and new people porting, new users

and I'd show them our customer list

And our customer list was getting much more impressive

It was people like Cisco that were beginning to appear

people like, you know, those dot-com companies

were started to show up on our customer list

and eventually the venture capitalists

you know, they kept looking at it

they kept saying "Oh, we can't quite do it"

Finally, Linus appeared on the cover of Fortune

There was something happening with Open Source

Well, at that point, the venture capitalists
couldn't ignore it

they just got sick of hearing about Linux everywhere

and they got tired of me, just, you know

showing it to them every,
at that point it was almost every week

So they uh, they decided it was time to invest,

that there was something happening

I announced Open Source to the world on the Internet

I did a lot of the early... administrative the work of

starting the Open Source Initiative

and I think six months later

I was reading the words Open Source

in the news all the time

And I was totally astounded

And a year later, I believe

Microsoft was talking about releasing some source code

And someone in the press asked Steve Ballmer

if they were going to open source their code

and Steve Ballmer said,

"Well, Open Source means more than
just releasing the source code"

And I realized that he had read my document

and understood it and was now telling
the press about this

Now if you are like just a guy on the net

who's not doing this for a job at all

and you sort of write a manifesto

and it spreads out through the world

and a year later

the vice president of Microsoft is talking about that

You'd think you were on drugs, wouldn't you?

But that's what really happened

The Local Users Groups
tend to be more than an issue of

building a social network

especially getting people familiarized with the issues

also just acting as a kind of supporting network

for people who do not, for example, have the ability

to pay for commercial support network

So one thing they're doing in this area

for example, is they're making these.

I think it's once a month

They're having install feasts, which mean that

getting Linux installed on their machines

or have some issue, I mean

maybe they've installed Linux

but want to set up the network in a specific way

can actually bring in their machines

to this users group meeting

And there's a lot of people there willing to help

who may have seen the same problem before.

Well, actually things aren't so well.

I tried it earlier myself. I had problems.

And so I came to this install feast world.

All the gurus abound.

Hopefully I'll have better luck getting it in.

Instead of having, uh, sending e-mails, or

writing to news groups on the Internet

and waiting several days for the answers sometimes

it's easy to come here and find other people

who might know about your problem

and may be able to help you

And hopefully within a few hours

you have your machine installed

Originally I wanted to it install on
uh, my larger laptop

and I just did a search on the net

and found where there were resources to get help

And um, I'm here today

cause I'm trying to put Linux on
this little guy right here.

just a Toshiba Libretto

It's not a easy thing in the world to do

because it's a weird piece hardware, So...

Any chairs right here?

I think that Department of Justice case

has made people aware of the fact that

you should at least look for alternatives to Microsoft.

and maybe Microsoft isn't the American dream after all

and that kind of shifting perception

you can very clearly see

that people just took Microsoft for granted

and maybe they're still buying Microsoft but at least

they're kind of more aware of the issue these days

Microsoft actually uses Linux as defense

They used Linux to ground a claim

that they don't have a monopoly

because Linux could essentially

push them off their catbird any time.

It was a very ingenious argument,
totally specious

because it didn't

do anything to answer the charge

that they had previously engaged in

bullying and very anti-competitive practices.

but it was clever of them

And, in an event, the judge didn't buy it

While ordinarily we in the Linux community are
rather worried about

letting Microsoft become the issue,

but there was a Slashdot article
about December of '98

where a fellow named Matt at the noodle
had pointed out that...

the of Australia has managed
to receive a refund for

the unused copy of Windows that
came with his computer.

So he declared the 19th of January, was January?

err, no, It was February. It was February.
Oh, I'm sorry, the 19th the February...

he declared 19th the February
Windows Refund Day.

and he encouraged everyone to go to
the computer manufacturers,

and return their unused copies of Windows...

as it was specified in the
Windows End-User License Agreement.

It's important to remember that
in the License itself, it says that

you can receive a refund if you don't use the software,

and that the manufacture is bound by law to do this...

or it was bond by contract.

and we found if you called up
these manufactures, they basically said...

"Stop bothering me." and keep hanging up on you.

We didn't really wanna sort of giving out our location,

or where we were going to meet, until...

you know, at the very last seconds.

What we did is, we have people meet
at the place where we could control

in the different towns around here.

So I was the San Jose marshal, and I believe Nick you were...

I was..., Rick Moen and I did San Francisco.

Right

and so we had the maps there and we
handed them off everybody who was coming.

Well, we actually met at a Denny's
That's just outside of the Foster City limits...

Foster City city limits,

which meant also just outside of
Foster City Police jurisdiction,

which meant any, any instances
that happened at the meeting point

happened in the jurisdiction of San Mateo,

and if they told us they get lost, we'd say,
"Fine, we are going to Foster city. Bye."

It's sort of the Dukes of Hazzard method of
avoiding the cops, so...

Well actually, originally we marched
on the other side of this building.

We marched around and up onto the parking
structure that's up there,

and that's where Microsoft had a reception
laid out for us with

drinks
and a big sign that said...

"Microsoft Welcomes the Open Source Community".

and the local news cameras got shots of
Eric Raymond and Microsoft representative.

Microsoft's story seems to mostly be that...

...this was not an issue for Microsoft,
rather from the OEMs.

So we all needed to go back to our
computer manufacturers and try yet again

to try and get refund from them.

We responded to them saying, you know,

that we tried that and it's not possible,
we need Microsoft to take action at this point.

And they just repeated the tag line
over and over again...

"you need to go to the OEMs and manufacturers
and get your refunds there."

We had about 150 people,
probably half of voyage had signs and such, so..

Well, we ended up actually right
in this courtyard here.

Basically we originally met, gathered outside,

various people sent groups in,
people from FreeBSD camp sent a couple of folks in.

We had Eric Raymond and Christ
actually tried to go up eventually.

They had blocked the elevator off to us.

[ Where are the offices? ]

The offices are right up here on the 9th floor.

We got some really nice parts out of it.

and we think as a result

Toshiba made a possible for you to buy
laptop without the operating system on it.

So, it's a small victory, but...

Well, even now, companies such as IBM and...

a lot of other computer manufacturers
are allowing you...

now to buy machines that don't have
Windows on them.

When I was a kid and I went to school,

the teachers will try to teach us to share.

They said if you bring some candy,

you can't eat it all yourself, you
got to share with other kids.

But now the administration says teachers
should be teaching kids to say yes to licensing.

If you bring some software to school,
"Oh! No, don't share it...

...sharing means you're pirate,
sharing means you will be put in jail."

That's not the way society should work.
We need the good will,

the willingness to help other people
at least when it's not too hard,

because that's the basis of society,

that's the fundamental resource.

They give us a society instead of
a dog-eat-dog jungle.

[ So what about people say if that if

you have rampant piracy and eliminate
the profit motive and...

...and creative works, software.
Will not... ]

Well, they were on both counts. For one thing,

people are making a profit from
developing Free Software,

but for another, the freedom to
have a community is more important.

[ People that look at, casually at
Open Source Free Software and think...

Well, because you are supposed to
share and do it for people's good will,

Doesn't that seem someone communist.
What's your response? ]

Absolutely nonsense,
it makes me really angry when people do that.

Well, back in, back in 1989,
actually communism would have been a compliment.

the word people were using at that time
was "crazy",

and I want them to use capitalism.

Communism is an ideology that forces people to share.

If you don't share, you get thrown in jail or killed.

In 1990, we got a visit from a director
of an institute in uh, the Moscow University,

and actually I saw him in Helsinki just 2 weeks ago,

but in an event, he came by,

and Richard Stallman had suggested
that he visit Cygnus,

because he was interested in and
understanding how the Free Software model...

might apply to stimulating entrepreneurial
innovation in Russia of all places,

and we had been kind of secretive
about our business plan,

because you know, we were not really
sure it's gonna work,

we didn't want to look too stupid if it failed.

But I was very very open with him.

The more I told him,
the more he started to shake his head like this,

and I finally said, you know, "What's wrong?"

And he said, "This sounds to much like communism
to be successful in Russia."

You got to go a Gulag and end up in a mass grave
with a bullet in the back of your head.

Open Source is not communism
because it does not force people.

Carl Marx did not invent helping your neighbor.

It's not communist to have a commons,

A commons existed long before communism as
a philosophy of government.

there are many commons in our lives,

For example, we drive on the highway,

something it is maintained for our common good.

Actually labeling our business model...

means that it misses the point a little bit.

whether it's communist, or whether it's capitalist,

the label doesn't matter, the real question is,

how much value can you deliver,
how scalable is the business,

what kind of problems,
what kind of of rate of innovation can you sustain.

and then, however you want to label that,
it's really up to you.

The Revolution goes Prime Time.

A lot of people described,

that August LinuxWorld as
"Linux's coming-out party",

Linus Torvalds was very funny about this,
he said, "What? Was Linux gay?"

But some people said
"Yeah, that was our debutante ball."

That was when the...

Linux Gods, and the hardware hackers
really got it together with the suits.

At 3pm on August 10th 1999,

Linus Torvalds delivered the keynote
address to the LinuxWorld.

The crowds of 6000 people began lining up at 12 noon.

Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Larry Augustin...

LinuxWorld Conference Chair and President and
CEO of VA Linux Systems.

These guys have to clap, I pay them.

Thank you all for being here,
looks like it's been a great show so far.

If you'll indulge me for a moment, I'm going to
try to avoid the glare of the lights.

I still think there's lots of people,
even though this is the 2nd show,

I still think there's lots of people
who don't quite get...

...what it is that's so exciting about Linux.

So there is a great show going
on next door,

there's huge exhibits and everything,

but it's the people out here
that are real contributors, not those companies.

The person on next I know you all know,

so I don't have to give anything in the way
as introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Linus Torvalds.

Linus

Thanks.

Calm down.

Calm down.

Say "oooo".

yes.

I don't want to just give one
of my normal talks,

because I find them boring,

probably by now most of you find them boring
too because you've heard them like 10 times.

But after the technical updates,
we will actually try...

...whether we can do a question and
answer session with 5,000 people,

or how many of you there are there.

and it may not actually work out,

because one of the 5,000 people is really loud.

The one thing I will do,

which I always do in all my talks is
the gratitude thing,

I want to kind of acknowledge the fact that...

...I'm obviously not been alone in doing Linux.

RHAT IPO: On August 11, 1999

Red Hat Software became
the first Linux company to go public.

Red Hat, up 228%

this the IPO the everybody was waiting for.

They of cause are behind
the Linux operating software.

Morgan J.T., I know

All I've gotten today,

are comments about
what the stock prices all morning,

you know it was 41, it was 42, it was 47,

it is 53, it is 51...

Every machine as far as I can tell
on the show floor

is pointed to their e-trade accounts or their
broker accounts, they know the Red Hat's price

I can't believe this.

I just heard 53.

Oh, boy.

Hang on, I didn't buy it.

You didn't buy?

No, no, I didn't buy.

I should've buy, but uh...

No no, that's great.

If it's... if it's....

You guys don't know?

Well, you know

Red Hat being successful as just being said

It legitimizes Linux
So it's much easier for us to go out

Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) ...
on the Red Hat IPO

It's kind of been a little bit divided.

You've got a lot of people

that are pretty hardcore and

And they are a kind of offended by that

you know, cause they worked really hard,
they are not really getting...

maybe they fair share out of that.

Some people do get ticked.

and you know the thing

that you see that on a lot of mailing lists
on the Slashdot you'll read, you know

This guy is really mad because he didn't
get chance to, he's didn't get a chance to do...

to get stock from Red Hat

He didn't get a chance to get...
to get a job from this other company, you know.

But the, the kind of the shocking secret
there is that,

Most the really hardcore guys,
you know, they don't care so much.

The guys that are kind of really down in trenches.

They're writing this code because
they need this code.

If we could invite Richard Stallman

who is the founder of
the Free Software Association

and Tim Ney, who's the managing director.

Here we go. Hahahahaha

Ah, here it is.

Now, Richard, I saw you playing your recorder
at, in Paris at that Linux conference

But I didn't have audio tracks.

So would you them to add audio to their, uh...

Video downstream next time

Uh..I don't have any control over that

unfortunately those things can
only be done with non-free software.

We give you the award, and before you say a word,

we'll have a Tim and yourself hold up
a little representation of the contribution

towards the Free Software Association.

So, very ironic things have happened,

but nothing to match this

Giving the Linus Tovarlds award
to the Free Software Foundation

is sort of like giving the
Han Solo award to the rebel fleet.

You see, some of you may not realize how far
that analogy goes.

But actually let me tell you
how this, how we got here.

see what happened this.

15 years ago, if you wanted to use a computer,

the only way you could do it
was to, was with proprietary software,

software that divides and subjugates the users.

And most people just...

A lot of people didn't like it.

But they saw there's no alternative.

But some of us were determined
to make an alternative.

And we said we're gonna develop
a free operating system,

a free software operating system

that will give users the chance to have freedom
while they use their computers.

Now a lot of people said, "Well, it's a nice idea

but it's so hard, you'll never get it done,

so I don't wanna participate,
I don't believe you can ever get it done."

But luckily not everybody said that.

And clearly, we knew
we would eventually get the kernel done.

But as it happens.

somebody else did a better kernel before we did.

Now in the old days, we had an overall strategy

from calling people's attention
to the importance of freedom

To the freedom they can have, or not have,
when they use a computer.

Well what can we do about it?
As far as I can tell,

the only workable way of trying to
change this make that strategy work again

is to, spread the word that the operating system
you're using is actually the GNU system.

Somewhat modify of cause.

And when people know this,

they'll take a look at the reasons
we developed this system.

They'll think about these issues.

And some of them will decide they agree.

So I ask people,
please tell the people this is the GNU system.

It's the combination of the GNU and Linux
so we can call it GNU/Linux

[ So Larry, when you were at Stanford 
8 or 9 years ago during your Ph.D

did you ever think in this position? ]

No

[ All kidding aside. ]

No I had no idea honestly

[ What did you think you would be
when you were finished up with your Ph.D? ]

You know that's a good question,

I really didn't have a good idea, I mean.

Here we are, on this huge show floor.

There are people just going crazy about Linux.

We had 6,200 people crammed into a room

to see the Linux, Linus speak last night.

Here we are, with, you know,

all of these huge venders all over the show.

I..It's, just, you have no idea that
this is gonna happen.

I mean this is just this little operating system
that were happy with.

that few people cared about, you know,

I thought I'd have a nice little
consulting business.

And here I am suddenly,

with all of this huge show going on.

It's just incredible.

I mean, a year ago, you could look and say,
you know, this is gonna be big

and everyone standing at the show going

"You know the show was big last year,

is it gonna, is it gonna be as big as this year?"

The you remind them

"You know, last year was only 6 month ago."

And then they go "Oh, , Linux time".

So leading up to the IPO, uh...

we had arrived actually in San Diego
on Tuesday night

We spent Wednesday morning meeting investors
in San Diago.

We flew up to San Francisco

spent Wednesday afternoon meeting
investment firms in San Francisco

VA Linux Selected
December 9, 1999, as the day
for its stock to begin trading.

then on the Thursday morning of the IPO is

when our stock would be traded publically.

So it was nice we had ended
the tour in San Francisco

because we could go to the credits suite's
trading desk the next morning

to watch the public offering.

And in San Francisco being close
enough to the company, and to our families,

we could invite people up to
actually join us in the first trade.

So I invited my wife and we invited Linus and Tove,

and a number of other friends and people
who worked in the company in to join us.

Whenever we invite Linus and Tove,

they have uh, two young children,

and I have a daughter, Andrea.

And we always bring the kids along

so we went in to the credit suite's trading floor

with all these traders and there are these 3 year old kids

running around and chasing each other
around the show floor,

around the trading floor.

So Linus and I walked in and
we walked up in to the trading floor

and everyone was very excited.

And we kept asking them, well
"Hows it going? Are things going ok?".

And they said, "Oh, it's.. uh, we're really excited,

I think things are going well.

We don't wanna, We don't wanna say,
We don't wanna jinx anything."

We walked in and it was a big screen TV showing CNBC.

And it was amazing to us,
but the theme for the day was Linux.

Now we have an IPO that's gonna go today.

And when I mean go, it is going to go.

The estimates I'm hearing are staggering.

But watch VA Linux Systems. It goes at 12:40 today.

The symbol is L-N-U-X.

A provider of large scale computer
servers and workstations,

specially designed for the Linux operating system.

The original range on this IPO was
11 to 13 dollars, then 21 to 23, then 28 to 30.

Priced at 30, and the estimates I'm hearing
I don't wanna repeat

because I don't have a confirmation.

But if they're true, they will blow you're mind
when this stock takes off at 12:40.

I turned to Linus and I said "Gee, did you ever think,

you know, you'd walk in here some day and
Linux would be THE theme on CNBC?".

and Linus said in his joking way said "Oh Absolutely!".

So we walk in and they show us
the buy and sell orders coming in..

and it's incredible.

We're seeing numbers like
320 dollars, 340 dollars a share.

And I'm just in complete shock.

You know, this is over 10 times
where we priced the offering. It was incredible.

And I remember Linus just kind of,
sort of patting me on the back and saying,

you know "Relax..." and it was
pretty exciting to see that.

We were, it was just amazing. We were stunned.

We were lucky that we were able to
get back to the offices,

we'd been in San Francisco
so we could come back to VA's offices

to, to see everyone in the office for the IPO.

When we got back, we had uh,
everyone was obviously very excited.

The IPO had done just tremendously well.

We had a little party that we put together.

It was interesting, while we were celebrating

there were plenty of people that were still trying to work.

I recall cries of "Be quiet!",
"We're on the phone!", "We're Working!",

Uh, as we uh, as we went in to the offices.

One of the things I did was
I gave the road show presentation

for the employees back at the office,

so they could have an idea of
what we'd been telling investors,

and understand exactly what we'd uh,
put together for them.

But again the story of the day is VA Linux,
now up 766% to 235 dollars to 265.

Sue, the best performing IPO ever.

Here it goes, Sycamore Networks was uh,
priced at 38 dollars, surged to $270.

This has just beat it. And by the way..

[ How do you feel about potentially billions
of dollars of wealth being created

from your creation,
that you're not directly cashing out? ]

So, if I hadn't made Linux available, I mean,

I wouldn't have gotten any money that way either.

So I mean, It's a win-win situation.

Uh, just the fact that there are
a lot of commercial companies

means that there are a lot of Linux people
who used to work on Linux kind of on the side.

And now they get paid for
doing what they wanted to do.

And that helps me in the sense that
I wanted them to work on Linux anyway.

The whole GNU project is really one big hack.

It's one big act of subversive playful cleverness,

to change society for the better, because
I'm only interested in changing it for the better,

but in a clever way.

Hi, we're the GNU/Stallmans, and this is
"The Free Software Song"