Torvalds: The Truth Shall Make You... Rich?

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November 14, 2000 (12:00 AM EST)

LAS VEGAS -- Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was among five luminaries who participated in a Comdex panel on "The International Impact of Linux."

During Monday's hour-long session, panelists weighed in on the growing use of Linux around the world, particularly in cash-strapped emerging economies, and asserted that Microsoft Windows -- at its current price -- is not an option for most of these high-growth regions.

Torvalds himself commented on a number of issues. Following are excerpts.

Moderator: What do you see as the big issue with respect to the internalization of Linux?

Torvalds: What is fascinating about the international side of Linux is that I've met a lot of people outside of the U.S. who are just doing their own thing and not just translating U.S.-based programs for their own locale. All these people can make their own decisions, and that's more important than IBM selling 15,000 terminals in Japan.

Moderator: What are the potential legal conflicts using GPLs in other countries?

Torvalds: It's not that the GPL isn't understood; it's the notion of copyright. Most legal problems here in the U.S. have to do with intellectual property law in general -- nothing like that would happen anywhere else in the world. Outside of the U.S, people don't care about copyright, and not because they're evil, but because they can't afford to.

Moderator: People are discouraged about the Linux economy. How can people make money with Linux?

Torvalds: I can give you an analogy from the past. One "company" that used to hold the truth was the Catholic church. The church made a lot of money by having a proprietary truth. All the richest people were religious people. The Pope had a lot more money than the scientists. The analogy is that the truth became open, like open source, and the truth was science. I believe open source and Linux is about the same thing. Sure, we broke the lock, but we opened the lock and opened the door to go past Microsoft where the whole market expands, and the end result is going to be a lot more money.

Moderator: What do we do about people who break the GPL?

Torvalds: It's true you'll find people who cheat, and cheat the music industry and Microsoft (stock: MSFT), and even when [we] complain, [we] know that the software industry came to be because of piracy. What drove the new industry was piracy, and how companies' [products] became so common, and now these companies don't want piracy anymore to grow; they want it to stop. But I suspect the GPL will cause less cheating.

Audience question: With so many Linux distributions out there, isn't that eventually going to cause fragmentation?

Torvalds: We'll certainly see fragmentation. You'll see people interested in high-end and they'll fragment off from people doing stuff for the PDA. The two will never really meet. They will use different tools, but there will be patterns that apply to both. Diversification is fine. The problem is when you get in-fighting -- that is, when you use your tools to destroy the other -- that's the problem and that's what happened with Unix. The open source community is slightly different than that.