51BloombergBusinessweek November 18, 2019
Opensourceis thedominantprocedureforsoftware
development,thoughit tooka revolutiontogetthere.
Inthe1990s,attheheightoftheMicrosoftWindows
empire,BillGates’ssubordinatesdescribedthecode-
sharingmodelas“acancer,”a threattoeverythingthat
patent-loving capitalists should hold dear. “If you told
someone 20 years ago that in 2020, all of human civi-
lization will depend on and run on open source code
written for free by volunteers in countries all around
the world who don’t know each other, and it’ll just be
downloaded and put into almost every product, I think
people would say, ‘That’s crazy, that’s never going to
happen. Software is written by big, professional compa-
nies,’ ” Friedman says in the vault. “It’s sort of a magical
moment. Having a historical record of this will, I think,
be valuable to future generations.”
To many in the software trade, the craziest and most
magical thing here is a Microsoft executive extolling the
importance of open source. The rise of open source has
indeed been huge, epochal even. And, like many signifi-
cant inventions—nuclear power, antibiotics—open source
carries risks. Some pretty weird ones, it turns out.
2
PROGRAMMERS FREELY
SWAPPED CODE LONG BEFORE
LINUS TORVALDS WROTE THE
CORE OF THE LINUX OS AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
IN THE EARLY 1990S, BUT HIS
CREATION WAS A STANDARD-
BEARER FOR WHAT BECAME
KNOWN AS “THE FREE AND
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
MOVEMENT.”
Microsoft was making obscene amounts of money
through Windows and Office, and closely guarded the
source code of these products. As the U.S. Department
of Justice began trying to reckon with Microsoft’s influ-
ence over innovation and competition, DIY hacker types
such as Torvalds argued that the very idea of patented
proprietary software stood in opposition to free speech,
free access to public goods and knowledge, and prog-
ress itself. (This was less radical than it might sound;
U.S. law didn’t recognize software as intellectual prop-
erty until the late ’70s.)
These idealists injected a dose of counterculture spirit
into the debate over how much control a few large compa-
nies ought to have around technological advances. Linux
became the most prominent alternative to Windows, and
other coders created a free package of open source Office
alternatives called, of course, OpenOffice. Both prod-
ucts struggled to find a mainstream audience, partly
because the developers were sometimes more focused
on the source code’s purity than on its usability. Yet they
gained valuable experience building development tools
that made it easier to collaborate and widely distribute
software. They could simply put their code online and let
word of mouth and network effects do most of the rest.
It took a long time—with lots of bitter fights and lawsuits
along the way—but eventually, open source became the
rule rather than the exception.
Google led the corporate charge in the early 2000s.
Instead of buying expensive operating systems, Google
ran Linux on the servers in its data centers. Then, it
took open source databases and file systems and wrote
its own open source applications to fill in the gaps.
This reliance on free software made it easier for Google
to afford to give away services such as search, email,
maps, and others. Facebook, Uber, Netflix, and many
others would do the same. Today, open source is the
engine of most major computing advances. Amazon.
com Inc.’s massive cloud networks rely on Linux and
many other free apps to function, which means that
the tens of thousands of businesses that buy comput-
ing power from Amazon’s data centers are living the
open source lifestyle, too. Google has placed Android,
a variant of Linux, on more than 1 billion smartphones.
Thousands of people have contributed to Linux’s
position at the heart of everything from TVs to cars,
but Torvalds, now 49 and living in Oregon, remains first
among equals. In addition to writing the core Linux code
that undergirds the internet and smartphones, Torvalds
wrote a program called Git over a weekend in 2005 to
help him manage the development of Linux. Some open
source coders took Git and turned it into GitHub.
Torvalds draws a healthy salary from the Linux
Foundation, a nonprofit funded by companies such as
Google, IBM, Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holdings,
and Intel to further develop the operating system. His
total annual compensation of about $1.8 million is more
than enough for him to buy a nice house in Portland
and do as he pleases, which mostly means sitting at
home coding. But if he’d been more interested in finan-
cial rewards and the daily grind, the guy might well
have Bill Gates money. On paper, the company that’s
made the most money from Linux is Red Hat Inc.,
which has created a custom version of the operating
system and charges client businesses to keep it updated
and secure. IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion earlier
this year in the biggest-ever software deal. GitHub