Linus Torvalds interview, part two: Linux and the future of computing
In the second part of a three-part interview, Linux creator and Millennium Technology Prize winner Linus Torvalds talks about real-world Linux and looks into the future
In the first part of our three-part interview, Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds talked about how he got into computing, Raspberry Pi and the "free software" movement.
In the second part, Torvalds takes us from Linux in the real world to the future of computing.
Q. What practical difference would you say that Linux has made "in the real world"?
The biggest impact of Linux has often been in areas that most users aren't necessarily even aware of. For example, in pure numbers, Android is likely the use of Linux that has the most people actually interacting with it directly every day (at some point Google was saying that they had half a million Android activations every day), yet almost nobody really thinks of it as being based on a Linux kernel. Sure, you can go into the settings menu and see the kernel version, but how many users really care?
And the thing is, users generally shouldn't care. They really shouldn't care what operating system they are running, they should care about the work they get done. The operating system should not only be invisible, but pretty much irrelevant.
And I'm fine with that. I think the real impact Linux has had is that it has enabled people to experiment and use the code-base that we've developed to build upon, and do more interesting things. I quoted Edison earlier, but my real favourite quote is from Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".
He was talking about how science builds upon the base that has been built before, and the same is very much true in technology. And I think that's where open source really shines - and is why I think open source is so important. Open source is basically taking the scientific approach of building on top of the openly published work of others, and applying it to software.
And software is too important in the modern world not to be developed that way. And that's what the real impact of Linux hopefully is - a way to allow people and companies to build on top of it to do their own thing. Whether that is a pure open source company like Red Hat, or whether it's by creating a product like Android (or Tivo, or a number of other things) on top of it is really not important. The important part is the concept that you can build on top of it.
Q. What plans are there to give it a greater impact?
I think a big part of the success of Linux has been the choice of licence... And the choice of the GNU Public Licence v2 (GPLv2) really is very important. It's what protects everybody from a wild free-for-all. Anybody can use it, and anybody can make improvements to it, but you have to make those improvements available to others.
And while those rules really came from technical people who were looking for a way to not be "taken advantage" of, it turns out that a lot of commercial companies really end up liking the rules too.
Sure, they have to make their changes available publicly, and that can sometimes feel like giving away your work, but since that rule applies to everybody, it really ends up being a case of the biblical "Give, and it will be given to you". And with so many people and companies involved, everybody really ends up getting more out of it than they put in.
There are other factors: Lucky timing and tons of good people involved. But if I had to boil it down to one single thing that mattered the most, I really would point to the licence.
Linus Torvalds interview, part two: Linux and the future of computing
In the second part of a three-part interview, Linux creator and Millennium Technology Prize winner Linus Torvalds talks about real-world Linux and looks into the future
Q. What do you mean by timing?
Just being in the right place at the right time. When Linux started, the internet was just getting to be widely enough deployed that you really could reach a lot of people, and at the same time cheap PC hardware had grown up just sufficiently that there was a real need for something like Linux.
As Linux grew more used and more powerful, the embedded market was also growing up and noticing that the CPUs they used were getting pretty powerful, and quite often being connected was a big deal - and where vendors had sometimes just built their own OS from scratch, people started noticing that they really needed a fully networked solution... Suddenly "just throwing something small and simple together" didn't work - you needed a full-fledged operating system.
So Linux has continued to find new areas where people noticed that they really needed something like it - and, hey, it's free, well known, and you can modify it for your own needs.
Q. How many Linux users are there in the world?
I can only point to some very high-level statistics...
On desktops, Linux has had a hard time cracking the 1 per cent mark, although some of the web analytics companies now put it at around 1.5 per cent. That's still a fair number of users, but it's definitely been the toughest market to get into.
In cellphones, Android is one of the dominant players. I don't know what the percentages are these days, but it's quite big. And in supercomputers, Linux last year was apparently running on 91 per cent of the computers on the Top 500 supercomputer list.
Q. How do you see the future for your invention and do you have any ambitions for it?
I've never been a "visionary" - I don't really worry too much about the future, the thing I tend to worry about is actual technical issues. My goal has always been to just make sure the technical side of Linux (and other projects I've been involved in) have been as solid as possible.
Of course, some of that involves trying to imagine what hardware and usage-scenarios will become, and a fair amount of it is about making sure that the technical underpinnings are flexible and maintainable enough that we won't have problems in the future. But it's really not the kind of "vision" for the future that I think you were thinking of. I really don't know what people are going to use Linux for, but I do know that we're doing our best to make sure that it all works very well technically.
Obviously, I do have high hopes and ambitions. I want Linux to be the obvious choice whenever somebody comes up with some new cool technical gadget, and are looking around for the core operating system to run on it. People used to make jokes about even toasters having computers in them in the future and while that still is something of a joke, if it ever happens, I hope that toaster will be running Linux.
Q. To what degree are you personally involved in driving these Linux ambitions forward?
It's still something I do every single day. I no longer spend all that much time actually writing code, but I'm what I'd call the main "technical lead" for the kernel. I spend a lot of time reading and writing emails, and merging the code that others have written.
Linus Torvalds interview, part two: Linux and the future of computing
In the second part of a three-part interview, Linux creator and Millennium Technology Prize winner Linus Torvalds talks about real-world Linux and looks into the future
For example, the merge window for our next release (which will be 3.4) opened just two days ago, so I have tons of requests to merge new code from the various subsystem maintainers. So I read the explanations of what's going on, sometimes ask for clarifications, and then actually merge the code into the "mainline" kernel, which is what I still maintain.
But just so that it's very obvious: I'm definitely not alone, and that's obviously part of the whole point about open source. There are literally thousands of people involved in writing code for the kernel. Each of our releases (and we do about four releases a year) tends to have about a thousand people involved with actual coding - many of them admittedly only making tiny trivial changes, but that's how people get started.
So I end up doing the release management and working with people and integrating things, but I don't do a whole lot of coding any more. For example, of the over half a million lines of new and changed code that I have merged so far during this merge window, I think I personally wrote a little over a hundred. So I really don't consider myself much of a coder any more, I'm definitely "management", even if that's a dirty word to most engineers...
Q. How do you see your future?
I really enjoy my work and I don't really see that changing a lot. Of course, who knows what will happen in five to ten years? Quite frankly, though, if I'm doing largely the same thing, I won't be unhappy. Of course, the technical problems constantly evolve, so it's not really the same old thing, but that's what keeps it interesting.
I'm simply not a very flighty person. I think that's one of the reasons behind the success of Linux: I'm still doing it more than 20 years later and, while I didn't originally believe it would be that kind of "lifetime project", at the same time I don't really see myself suddenly deciding to do something else.
That said, outside of my work, there's obviously other things going on too. My kids are growing up, with the eldest in high school right now, and we'll be starting to worry about colleges etc. And I have my hobbies (mainly scuba diving), and if there is one particular "personal ambition" I have it really is to just have a "good life". Part of that is interesting and meaningful work, part of it is family, but part of it is just enjoying things like my diving too.
Q. What other third parties are driving these ambitions forward?
Absolutely. Much of the drive behind new code and features in Linux comes from commercial companies. That can be anything from hardware companies wanting to make sure that Linux works on the new hardware they are building, to support and service companies wanting to make sure Linux works as well as possible for their customers. And of course technology companies that have some new niche that they are going for, and that need some particular feature to really well.
In fact, my personal wants and needs stopped driving Linux development long ago. Linux has done everything I really needed it to do for a long time... Going back ten or 15 years ago, it was mostly individual, technically minded developers and some university research projects.
These days, it really tends to be fairly big technology companies that have a particular area that they are interested in improving and driving Linux forward in. What's so interesting - and so good - is how open source really means that all these different interests can "meld", and the end result is really much better for it. Exactly because there is not just one company with one single vision, but lots of people with different ideas, and that balances the end result out.
Q. Bearing in mind the vast global changes we saw brought about by technology in the 20th century, could similar leaps be made in the 21st century? Or do you see a comparative slowing down in the rate of innovation?
I think we're actually approaching a fairly interesting decade or two. We're not far from starting to bump up against some fundamental physical scale-barriers in making computing elements smaller and cheaper. It hasn't stopped yet, but electronics manufacturing is starting to get to the point where the feature sizes aren't that many atoms across.
Linus Torvalds interview, part two: Linux and the future of computing
In the second part of a three-part interview, Linux creator and Millennium Technology Prize winner Linus Torvalds talks about real-world Linux and looks into the future
While people have doubted the continuation of Moore's law before - and been wrong - I do think it's different this time, exactly because of how close we're getting to feature sizes where we basically measure things in individual atoms. If Moore's law slows down and then stops, that will seriously change the computer industry.
At the same time, I think that the thing that has really driven technical innovation has always been communication, and how that enables people to more easily combine and accumulate information. So while electronics manufacturing and the current computer industry may be facing a hiccup, I suspect it will mean that other areas will take up the slack. Because if there is something we've been getting better at lately, it's been exactly that "communication" part. Linux is obviously one example of that, and I don't think we're facing any fundamental slow down.
Q. Where do you see technology innovations today and in the near future?
Computing is still a big deal and I think the fact that it still (at least for a while) is just getting cheaper and more powerful, will drive a lot of innovation. Just the fact that you can economically do form-factors that just weren't realistic before (small, energy-efficient, connected and mobile) really does mean that there's potential for fairly smart devices everywhere.
One thing I personally love, and is starting to happen, is how having all of those cheap mobile devices ends up actually giving us lots of real-time information. You can already get traffic information that isn't from some centralised city "measure number of cars going through a particular intersection", but that is aggregated from the data of people driving with their cellphones.
There are obviously all the privacy issues, but this is the kind of "everyday boring information" that can actually affect your life, and that used to be hard to really get real-time. The fact that we are now starting to have navigation devices that take traffic information into account, and it really works (it's not new, but it's actually starting to work in practice these days), is just the first step. I think there's a lot of this kind of "ambient data" that can drive interesting applications.
It won't result in anything flashy like jetpacks or flying cars, but it will be the small details in how you interact with your environment (and vice versa). And a lot of it will really be about humans, not the technology itself. The technology just makes things possible.
It's not just that you're carrying a smartphone around: the fact that you carry a versatile and interactive device in your pocket ends up also raising the bar for what you expect from the technology around you. ATM's with ugly text and bad touch screens just look clunky to you, don't they? And why is the radio in your car so stupid? And why am I standing here waiting for the light to turn green in order to cross the road, even though there are no cars anywhere?
So there's a lot of places where the spread of cheap computing can make these kinds of small subtle changes, it just takes a long time to really permeate everywhere.
That said, if I went to university today, I would still probably go into computer science just because I think computers are fun. But from a "big innovation" standpoint, computing these days is more of a tool than, necessarily, the main subject. Computing is a big tool for things like really understanding bio-chemistry, and driving personalised medicine, for example.
I'm also still hoping for major steps in energy. Maybe they'll finally prove the old joke wrong: "[nuclear] fusion is twenty years in the future, and always will be".
Linus Torvald was in conversation with Technology Academy Finland, the body that awards the Millennium Technology Prize, which he won this year.