In Linus’s essay, “King of the Ball,” he discusses the next few years of his life in the 1990s where he moved to the US and Linux took off. He begins the essay by describing some of the “growing pains” he experienced as Linux grew and grew. The first thing he mentions is the marketing for the Linux 1.0 release. Linus wrote, “we needed a public relations strategy. I wasn’t going to personally champion the effort” (p.127). From what I’ve read and what I’ve seen in class, Linus is strictly interested in the development of the technology, and frankly nothing else. So his disinterest in the marketing wasn’t surprising to me. He did understand the value that marketing might have for Linux, however, so he dealt with this growing pain by outsourcing help from Lars and other volunteers to get the release going, comparing this “open source” effort to market Linux to the development of Linux itself. Another growing pain he mentions was the constant attention of journalists he received shortly after the announcement: Linus wrote, “journalists, mostly from trade publications, started knocking at my door… until we made our new house a Journalist-Free Zone [years later]” (p.129). Linus and Tove (Tove especially) were unhappy with the personal attention their house was receiving. In terms of dealing with the problem, we see Linus establishing his new house as journalist free.
Now, the growing pain that is explicitly described by Linus as a growing pain: the trademark crisis. Someone in Boston had registered the trademark for the word Linux. Linus wrote, “Everybody in the Linux community knew we would contest the trademark. The problem was, we didn’t have an organization for putting up a good fight” (p.134). The solution the lawyer came up with was to transfer the trademark to someone else. So it was transferred to Linus because he was the “original user of the word”. They reached an out of court settlement because it was “easiest and cheapest”. Linus called this particular growing pain a “distraction” from what was really important (p.135). One of the last “growing pains” he mentions was the offer from an engineer at Intel’s lab in Portland, OR for an internship in the US. Linus contemplated the offer, but felt “a bit uneasy about leaving school without having finished [his] master’s” (p.136). So, he decided to stay in Helsinki with Tove until he finished his masters. This, along with gaining seniority with his job at the University, gave Linus a growing pain unrelated to Linux and simply related to his life: he “was twenty-six and for the first time in [his] life [he] was feeling old” (p.137). Linus dealt with this growing pain by using the feeling for motivation to get his master’s done and move on.
Work-life balance for Linus personally became an issue in the Linux community at the end of 1996 when Linus agreed to work for Transmeta in the US and when news spread that Tove was pregnant. This sparked the “big, worldly debate centered on whether [he] could possibly keep true to [his] open-source philosophy in a dreaded commercial environment” or balance “the demands of Linux maintenance with those of a family” (p.141). I guess this is also a sort of growing pain for Linus as he has to answer to a large community that perhaps idolizes him and counts on him to maintain Linux. Even with these three major responsibilities in his life emerging, however, he maintains “neither Transmeta nor Linux have ever gotten in the way of a good night’s sleep” and denounces the idea of “working long days and doing double, triple, or even quadruple shifts” (p. 148).
Steve Jobs wanted Linus to come and work with Apple and “try to get the open source people behind Mac OS X” (p.149). The problem was, Linus had no intention of doing so and “disagreed with almost everything [Jobs] said,” especially on the topic of the Mach-based operating system that Apple was using. Steve wanted to join forces and “get the desktop market” but Linus didn’t really care for his argument. Despite their disagreements, Linus still “kind of liked him” (p.151).
On the other hand, when Linus met Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, he was disgusted at first with his tactics and views of open-source people. Linus was invited to a private preannouncement briefing for Sun Microsystems because “they were doing Jini under what, at Sun Microsystems, passes for open source” (p.151). Once Linus got there, he discovered what they meant by open source (they explained their licensing) and he thought “it was horrible. Just stupid”. This was because “if somebody else wanted to use the system in even a half-commercial way, it wouldn’t be open source at all.” (p.152). So he walked out on the briefing.
As Linux grew and infiltrated the corporate world, becoming more and more successful, Linus became “poster boy” for open source, and “felt a growing sense of responsibility” (p.165). He dealt with this responsibility and success by sticking to his ideals and trying to represent the open source community as best as he could.
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