the man behind linux
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page 2: Rebel, Rebel
Upside: Would you consider yourself a hacker in a positive traditional sense, a rebel? I find it hard to call you simply "a dedicated programmer."
Torvalds: I try to avoid the term hacker. In personal conversations with technical people, I would probably call myself a hacker. But because hacker these days means something else, when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
Upside: What about the label "rebel"?
Torvalds: Rebel implies that you do it for a cause and that you're doing it against something else. Instead of saying I'm a rebel, I'd say I'm ethical. Rebel [connotes] that you're doing it against something; I think I'm doing it for something. That's the difference. I have my own ethics, and I don't care whether anybody else believes in those ethics because I think that's a personal choice.
Upside: How would you describe your ethics and goals?
Torvalds: My basic rule of life is, "Do unto others as you would [have others] do unto you." It's not Christian, it's global. It's a simple rule, and in most situations it tells you what you should do. If you ever wonder, "What should I do?" and you ask yourself that question--"What would I want somebody else to do?"--suddenly you know the right answer.
Upside: Do you believe there's a social or political element to your work and your technology?
Torvalds: It didn't start out that way. It started out asocial. The initial motivation was technical and [involved my] interests. It hasn't been political because again, political [assumes] you're trying to change somebody's mind about something, and I've been trying to avoid the coercive side of [the issue].
That's not necessarily true of [many] of the other "open source" communities. A lot of it has been political, where people have tried to convince other people, and I've tried to stay away from that. I talk about what I think is the right thing, but I talk about it when somebody asks me.
Upside: It strikes me that there were many points when you could have gone commercial or decided that the Linux operating system should become commercial, and you obviously decided not to do that. Why?
Torvalds: It was a question of my interests. I was always interested in doing Linux for the technical side. It didn't start as a project to make money, and when it became clear that it could make money, that wasn't why I did it. That would have changed my motive.
I'm happy that people are making money on Linux because I think it gives more depth to Linux. It brings in new motivations and new factors that wouldn't have been there if it [weren't] for the commercial end of the business. But when I started Linux, [going commercial] wasn't an option.