The Long View on Linux, Part 1

I met Phil in 1990, not long after I met
my wife, Joyce. It was kind of a package deal. Joyce collected
interesting friends, and Phil was near the top of her list. She had
met him earlier in Seattle while she was dating another UNIX geek.
Both shared the curse of knowing they were smarter than pretty much
everybody else (although Joyce is a bit more modest about it),
along with a raft of common interests including travel, business,
food and constant repartee spiced with affectionate insults.
Joyce always stayed at Phil's house when she visited Seattle
(we live in the Bay Area). And, the fact that he can say "I've been
sleeping with your wife longer than you have" and I'll buy him a
beer, explains a lot about the man. Remarks like this are pure
Phil. He knows where the line is, so he crosses it. Just one thing
that makes him a great geek.

Phil is also a polymath. He's not just good at a lot of stuff
- he's downright brilliant.Take auto mechanics. The guy personally keeps a
three-decade-old Mercedes diesel on the road, plus an electric car
he made himself out of an old Volkswagen Rabbit.He's an electronics wizard who knows a frightening amount
about broadcast electronics. Being a former obsessive radio freak,
I thought I knew a thing or two about radio engineering. That was
until Phil and I got to talking about his transmitter-hunting days
as a teenage geek in Los Angeles. As a kid growing up in New
Jersey, I used to go down to the Meadowlands with a transistor
radio to solve the mystery of which sets of giant towers belonged
to which monster AM radio stations. Meanwhile, Phil and his buddies
played go-find-it games with little home-brew transmitters they'd
hide around the LA basin, sometimes playing tricks like rigging the
things up to railroad tracks, so the locus of radiation would be
twenty miles long. Advantage: Phil.Last summer at our house, Phil fixed an FM transmitter kit
that had been vexing me for a year. It took him about three
minutes, during which he explained what was wrong with not only my
tools, but with the transmitter design, starting with the chip that
did most of the work. His own home-brew transmitter (of his own
design, I am sure) was better. How could I argue? Why
bother?It's worse with computers, because that's Phil's business.
He's been around computing longer than most humans have been on
earth. He also knows a significant trend when he sees one, which is
why he turned his attention to Linux before most of the world even
noticed the Net.In '93 and '94, he flattered me by including my e-mail
address in a list that explored the idea of doing a free-software
magazine. I followed as best I could (for a geek who was definitely
not in the same caste as the other listees).
But we were all surprised when Phil suddenly decided to do a
magazine on Linux. What the hell was Linux? Phil knew.In '94, when the 1.0 kernel came out, so did Linux
Journal. I was amazed to see how steadily it grew, and
how (as usual) Phil seemed to be right about Linux's inevitable
triumph in the marketplace. Even though it was free, business would
find it more useful than most of the costly stuff it competed with,
he said, just like it did with the Net. And, as with the Net,
commercial development was inevitable.In early '99, Phil showed me Star Office running on a Linux
laptop with KDE. It looked like such a Windows-killer that the
possibilities blew my mind. Then he asked me to join
Linux Journal to expand coverage of business
issues, so I did. (This was right around the same time as I started
co-writing The Cluetrain
Manifesto, which was kind of a double-whammy career move
for me.)Last August, Red Hat went public. Cobalt, VA Linux and
Andover followed. Billions of dollars in new Linux wealth was
created in less than two seasons. And then, it melted like snow at
the end of winter. The mainstream press, especially the old PC
rags, have been tarring Linux as last year's fad. But, as Phil is
quick to point out, the sum of Linux companies together have a lot
more value than they did a year ago. Again, the long view. Since
we're both 52, it's one I understand.I interview a lot of CEOs who are hot for some newsy reason.
But interviewing Phil makes sense for other reasons. One, he's a
major Linux figure whose modesty has kept him out of his own pages.
Another is that he has a perspective that comes from something more
than transient good fortune. He was smart to begin with, but he's
learned from experience, and he's had more than just about
everybody else.Doc Searls: You
were an old hand at UNIX when Linus was still a kid messing around
with a Commodore VIC-20. What can you tell us about UNIX that seems
to be getting forgotten as the Linux industry moves into
enterprises where the most familiar computing worlds are Microsoft
NT and Windows?Phil Hughes: My first UNIX
exposure was in 1980, when I convinced the company I worked for
that a UNIX system and the C language would solve all our problems.
This was with an engineering-based company that manufactured
semiconductor test equipment.What we needed was a software development environment where a
handful of engineers and programmers were writing code to control
the equipment we were designing. The reason UNIX was the right
answer is that we needed a cooperative environment where multiple
users could share files; we needed compilers and assemblers; and we
needed the building blocks to put together some support tools, such
as programs that could reformat and download code into the machines
we were building.Someone, possibly
Dennis
Ritchie, described UNIX as a toolbox full of tools. When
you were presented with a problem, you would divide it up into a
set of smaller problems and then see if there were tools available
to solve each smaller problem. It wasn't uncommon to write a little
C code, maybe an awk or sed script, and a few calls to utilities
such as sort and uniq and glue the whole thing together with a
shell script.This is much different from today's GUI approach, where you
find one huge monolithic program and try to coax it into doing what
you want. Maybe you can -- but, if you can't, you are at a dead
end.Doc: This is the
stuff I learned (which might be an exaggeration, but let's pretend)
in the excellent "Intro to Linux" class I took at
SGI
a few weeks ago. What amazed me was that the toolbox nature of UNIX
made both creating tools and solving problems extremely easy. Yeah,
it was certainly a brainer to learn shell commands, but it was a
revelation to learn how easy it is to make and move directories, to
view and change permissions, to rename and move a file at the same
time. Same thing with searching through grep and regular
expressions. Sure, you can do sophisticated searches with the GUI
Find command in KDE, Gnome and the PC operating systems, but the
speed, flexibility and innate sophistication just aren't there. And
they're slow.Phil: This is always an
issue when we hire new people. They can be productive faster if we
hand them Star Office, but investing in them and teaching them
shell commands, vi, troff and such, makes them much more productive
in the long run. The best example is in editorial, where everyone
uses vi to prepare articles for layout. It would take so much
longer if they used a word processor instead of vi. People like
Darcy who have been with us a long time are proof of this.Doc: I'm wondering
about two things: 1) how long it takes people to learn Linux basics
such as the ones you just listed, and 2) how much people who are
not geeks feel empowered to solve their own problems. Some context:
I've noticed in most businesses that people tend to learn five
things each about Microsoft Office: how to format a document, how
to do sums in a spreadsheet, how to build a slide, how to write and
send e-mail and how to call a tech for help when the system
fails.Phil: Some of the people we
have hired were UNIX people, so they had all the background they
needed. The majority, however, didn't. Those who were most
successful at learning Linux started out in jobs where they could
be fairly productive with a minimum of Linux knowledge. Darcy is an
example. She started here five years ago as a shipping person. She
needed to learn only our proprietary database system and e-mail, as
far as computers was concerned. As she learned more, she got to do
more.We see few geeks who decide they can solve their own problems
on a serious level. Some have shown an interest in learning a lot
more. This is why we virtually gave some systems to a few
employees.Doc: So GUI
computing is secondary at Linux Journal. For
the most part, the company runs in command-line
mode.Phil: Yes, but I'm not
saying that GUI computing is bad, just that it isn't always the
solution. My big concern is that it is changing the way people
think. Rather than looking at a problem and logically addressing
it, I see people deciding that a spreadsheet is the solution to
every problem because all they understand is spreadsheets.Or, to go back to a common analogy, everything looks like a
nail if the only tool you have is a hammer. You can keep adding
features to your hammer, but you still have a hammer.Doc: I see it as
something like auto mechanics. You can do so much more if you know
how the computer really works. And too few people do, just as too
few people know how a car works.Case in point. A few days ago, a friend dropped us off at the
airport in my old Subaru wagon. On the way home, she panicked as it
gradually lost power and finally seemed to blow up, with big bad
noises and white smoke billowing out from under the hood. It was a
harrowing story as she told it, shaded by her certainty that the
motor had exploded. I've never been a professional mechanic, but
for years I drove nothing but cars that required a toolbox in the
trunk, and I've done a lot of problem-solving work on a lot of
cars. When I listened carefully to her report, it was clear that we
were dealing with a cooling issue here. Sure enough, I found a
broken plastic part in the middle of a hose line between the heater
and the rest of the cooling system. So, I took the short tube that
survived from the broken plastic part, shoved it into the ends of
the two hoses, clamped them down and had the mother back on the
road again in about 20 minutes. The difference is that my friend
didn't understand how cars worked, or even how to fix simple
problems. She never even looked at the water temperature gauge on
the dashboard.I think a UNIX jock looks at the OS in the same way a
mechanically inclined driver looks at a car. If problems develop,
chances are they're exposed and fixable.Phil: It's exactly the same
thing. You can even continue down this same line with the car. You
don't have to understand physics to drive a car, but if you do, you
will be better prepared to deal with situations such as when you
are driving on slick pavement.Doc: I think you
also understand when something is a major failure, or a problem you
can keep an eye on or even overlook. Something that blew my mind,
as a GUI guy, about Linux (and UNIX) was that it was capable of
sustaining all kinds of program and other failures, and carrying on
anyway. Failures are rocks in a wide stream of processes that just
keep flowing. To follow the automotive metaphor, in a sealed-hood
system such as Windows or Macintosh, minor failures bring the whole
thing down. The fact that Windows finally evolved enough to handle
multitasking did nothing to reduce the number of what NASA calls
Crit-One failures: fatal problems there's no way around. I'm told
Windows 2000, the latest NT actually, is better at this, but there
is no way logically (it seems to me) that it can compete with Linux
for reliability, simply because too much of it is off-limits to
mechanics. It's in the secret bits, sealed in
concrete.Yet the PC press doesn't ever talk about this, simply (I
think) because they're used to driving fancy cars with automatic
transmissions and sealed hoods. The UNIX world -- including the
whole Net, and the way it works -- is a whole that cannot be
understood in terms of a few personal parts, no matter how fancy
they are.Phil: NT was a new system
written from the ground up. Thus, it has some advantages in that it
could be written to address problems with older MS products. But,
there are two problems. The first is compatibility. NT has a lot of
stuff in it to make it almost compatible with Windows9x. That means
it has to support some of the shortcomings of Windows9x. Second, it
has an amazing number of new lines of code. That guarantees a
certain number of bugs.Doc: One of the
virtues of a Linux box running a GUI such as KDE or GNOME is that
you can go into terminal mode and work in the command line. You
can't do that with Windows. And you can't do that with a Macintosh,
although the next version of the Mac GUI will sit on open-source
BSD with a Mac kernel and command-line access. If you want, you can
open a shell, get in there and do real computing stuff. I'll be
interested in seeing if that makes any difference in the
marketplace. Apple is already quietly running most of its heavy
servers on the new OS. This may be the result of Steve Jobs
spending ten years in the UNIX world at NeXT.Phil: You can get a shell on
a Windows box, but there are many fewer capabilities and a lot less
sophistication than with Linux. I seldom use Windows, but every
time I do, the first thing I do is bring up a shell in case I want
to do anything real, which I define as removing a file, moving a
file, copying a file ... you get the idea. Note that the most
common thing I end up doing is copying files to floppy disks so I
can take them to a Linux system and use tools such as sed and awk
to work on them. vi isn't a problem; I always put vi on Windows
boxes.Doc: I
remember Linux Journal growing out of an email
conversation -- which I was improbably part of -- about starting a
free-software magazine. A couple questions here: 1) who else was in
that original group? and 2) what exactly
happened?Phil: In 1993, I had an idea
to do a free-software magazine. While SSC was doing pocket
references for UNIX and UNIX-related programs, I decided I wanted
to do this magazine independent of SSC. There were six or seven of
us involved in talking about the original idea. Early players
included Arnold Robbins, author of some of SSC's products; Laurie
Tucker, a friend in Atlanta; Gerry Hammons, a longtime friend and
co-worker from years before; David Keppel, a UW computer science
grad student; and Melinda McBride, another co-worker from a
previous job.I had set up a mailing list so we could all keep in touch.
One day, I realized that to do a good free-software magazine, you
would have to be like Consumer Reports and have no advertising. I
did a little arithmetic, and realized that we were about $9,999,900
short of the $10 million I estimated it would take to start the
magazine. I posted to our list what I initially thought was a joke:
why don't we just cover Linux?Everyone thought it was a great idea. So, I decided to think
seriously about it, and agreed. It had balance: it wouldn't cost
much to do, but there wasn't much market either. Not sure if that
was good balance, but it was balance.I posted some questions on comp.os.linux, the only Linux
Usenet newsgroup at the time, and received very favorable
responses. Thus, it looked like we had an audience, so I set the
wheels in motion.Things looked pretty good, and we were almost ready to dive
in full-force when some disasters struck. The most significant was
that my friend Gerry died. He was doing some programming for the
infrastructure we needed, plus he was going to invest. It was
obvious that we needed to put the project on hold, and I made
another Usenet post to let people know there was a very large bump
in the road.At the time, Bob Young had started a publication called New
York Unix. Someone saw the post about our problems, and gave it to
Bob. Bob contacted me, and suggested that he could be publisher if
I could take on the task of editor. We decided to go for it.After two issues, it was clear to both Bob and me that this
wasn't the right relationship. We split the responsibilities, with
him assuming the debt for printing already done, and I took the
subscription obligation -- the 926 readers who had paid for 10 to
12 more issues of the magazine. I rolled Linux
Journal into SSC, and we ran with it.Doc: So it's true
you gave Bob Young his start with Linux?Phil: Yes.Doc: That checks
out. When I talked to Bob a couple weeks ago, he gave you all kinds
of credit for getting his Linux career started. When I told him
"Phil says he taught you how to spell Linux," he said, "It's true!
I owe a lot to Phil. He even gave me one of my favorite metaphors:
that closed source is like a car with the hood welded shut." (Note:
I have this conversation on tape, so I can use the original
verbiage, which is close to this. He also offered to help promote
your next book, whatever it might be.)Phil: While he gives me
credit for the hood metaphor, I really don't remember using it.
But, I do like it.Doc: That's like
the line that produced the name for The Cluetrain Manifesto: "the
clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they
never took delivery." The guy who told me that has no memory of
saying it.Anyway, who's still involved?Phil: Laurie Tucker is on
the SSC staff, with the title Special Projects. She edits articles,
writes code and is currently responsible for the LJ
Buyer's Guide. Arnold Robbins wrote for us for a while,
but we couldn't afford to pay what he was worth at the time so he
went on to other things. David Keppel got his Ph.D. and now works
for Transmeta.Doc: One of the
most interesting things to me about Linux Journal
is how it seems to be written, to a large extent, like
Linux itself. Many of the features and columns come from readers --
members of the Linux community. And most of these are people
solving real problems. I get a sense with both Linux and
Linux Journal that we're all working together to raise a
barn.Phil: It has exactly that
feeling. In the early days, many authors were surprised that we
actually paid them to write for us. Some just donated the money to
the Free Software Foundation or other projects.Doc: Y'know, the
e-world is full of all these new acronyms around commerce: B2B for
business-to-business, B2C for business-to-consumer, B2E for
business-to-enterprise. None have dialogue to them. All are just
new names for the old conveyor-belt model of business we've had
ever since our ancestors with craft surnames like Smith, Miller,
Farmer and Baker got pulled out of their shops and given a job with
an industrial supplier in a mine or a factory. Business has been
out of touch with real markets and real customers for a good two
centuries. And most of what I read in the business press, which is
itself a huge new industry, is about leveraging that model: taking
what we know about industry -- this conveyor belt, a "value chain"
from the few to the many -- and installing it in the technology
world which, frankly, geeks built ... and not for corporate
purposes.So I have an acronym for Linux
Journal: G2G for geek-to-geek. Because that's the model
that is making the new world, and the great irony is that the New
Economy folks haven't got a clue about it. Which makes it that much
more subversive.Phil: This isn't new.
Remember, UNIX was born because 30 years ago, a couple of geeks
wanted to play a computer game. I wonder if 30 years from now, most
people will not even know that Linux was a student project.
Actually, I wonder how many don't know that now.Doc: How do you
see the free/open movement today? How has it changed? Is it for the
better?Phil: There are two things
here: open and free. We had open and free software on mainframes in
the '60s and '70s. If you bought a mainframe, it came with an
operating system complete with source code. When you were shelling
out millions of dollars for the computer, or more commonly, leasing
a multi-million-dollar computer system, why not give you the code?
It wasn't like you would go to Radio Shack, buy another computer
and copy the OS.A combination of the price drop in hardware, generic hardware
and Amdahl Corporation forced a change. First, Gene Amdahl, who had
designed IBM's mainframes, started his own company to make machines
like the IBM mainframes. By "like", I mean they had the same
instruction set and could, therefore, run the same operating
system. IBM now had to unbundle and charge for copies of the OS so
they could make money off the sales to Amdahl users.Doc: I've never
heard this analysis before. It's really fascinating. What you're
saying is that, historically at least, software really did want to
be free. And Bill Gates invented an industry that didn't need to be
there. This is what Neal Stephenson suggests in his great little
book, In the Beginning was the Command Line.Phil: Yes. The OS was
something the computer manufacturer had to include with their
hardware. Without it, they couldn't sell the hardware.Doc: You think IBM
is going back in that direction with Linux? They're communicating
rather clearly that they don't much give a shit any more about
selling OSes, maybe because that was never the idea in the first
place. They sell iron. Why not sell iron that's easier to deploy
because it runs a universal OS?Phil: Yes, I do. IBM
abandoned their web server in favor of Apache. I think they know
people don't want to buy an OS -- they want to buy a solution.
Actually, I think they knew this when the PC came out. I feel that
Microsoft managed to confuse the issue and IBM fell for it for a
while.The first cheap and generic computer was the IBM PC. Other
manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon to make inexpensive clones.
That meant the OS cost again could not be bundled with the hardware
cost. Besides the end of "free" in terms of price, the openness of
the past was gone because there was direct competition.The GPL is an attempt to force freedom back into the mix. It
is only one example, with the BSD license being another. Each has
its advantages and disadvantages, but my point is that we used to
have this freedom, but because hardware changed, we now had to do
something different in order to get free --
both in terms of price and freedom -- back into computing.Explaining the BSD license to a businessperson is fairly
easy. They will remain skeptical, but it is easy to tell them you
can get something for free, do whatever you want with it and then
sell it.Doc: Because you
have to credit only the originator, no?Phil: Exactly. You can build
a proprietary product, and don't have to pass along your additions
or improvements.The GPL is a lot harder. They don't understand why it makes
sense to make the changes and then give them away.Or that they are expected to give away whatever changes they
make. In other words, not to act like they own it
exclusively.In a business sense and out of context, it doesn't. But, that
context is the issue. It's the same as IBM giving you the OS with
the hardware; you need to show that businessperson how giving away
the OS will sell something else. Sorta like giving away a keychain
at the car dealer, and then hoping you buy a car to go with
it.As each new vendor enters the Linux space, you need to
educate them. You need to show them success stories. Eventually,
they will get it.

email: ljeditors@ssc.com