Under the Radar by Robert Young, Corolis, $27.50/£25.50, ISBN
1576105067
WHOEVER controls computer operating systems has an increasingly powerful grip
on the planet. So who’s it to be: Microsoft or a vast anarchy of geeks?
Under the Radar is the story of this conflict, aiming to thrill us with the
daring exploits of an upstart company battling Bill Gates, the Darth Vader of
the computer industry.
The story it tells probably is exciting, if you are excited by descriptions
of meetings: board meetings, meetings between executives, meetings with
investors. In this book, a sales pitch to a corporate vice-president is treated
as high drama.
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Buried under the meetings is another story, about the interesting phenomenon
of the Linux operating system and the “open source” software movement. Robert
Young is in a good position to tell that story. He’s the former chief executive
officer and now chairman of Red Hat, a North Carolina company that raised
$84 million from the investing public this summer. Its curious business
plan is to persuade people to pay for its version of the Linux operating system,
even though they could download other versions for free.
As the software platforms on which all other programs, such word processors
and spreadsheets, depend, operating systems are crucial. Unlike Windows, the
most widely-used operating system, Linux isn’t owned by anyone. Its “source
code”—the instructions written by humans that get translated into working
software—is written by volunteers and freely available.
Young is eloquent in describing the benefits of open source—mostly, a
large group of volunteer programmers eager to point out weaknesses in your
programs, and often willing to improve them. The result is that bugs get fixed
swiftly, and Linux can run for many months without crashing.
So why doesn’t everyone use it? Because it’s always been a pain in the butt
to get it installed and working on your computer.
The idea behind Red Hat was that people would pay for a version of Linux that
promised to be easy to install and use.
Depressingly for the herds of anarchistic programmers, it may be that it took
sales droids to make Linux popular.
Two exceptions are Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. Stallman, the founder
of the Free Software Foundation and of the open source movement in general, is
described as a “mad prophet”, exhorting the faithful to give up their
proprietary software and embrace open source. Torvalds, who released the first
version of Linux in 1991 while a student at Helsinki University, comes across as
a likeable, unassuming programmer who did some good work and is bemused to find
himself at the centre of a revolution.
Their stories are a lot more interesting than Red Hat’s. On the other hand,
Young is probably right about the importance of commercialisation.