Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
Good morning.
Thank you.
So, many of you may not recognize this person on the screen.
He lives here in Portland, Oregon.
He was named the 17th most influential person of the century by Time magazine.
This is Linus Torvalds, and if you've never heard of him,
you've probably heard of the software he created.
Linus Torvalds created Linux, the world's most successful software.
It runs everything. I'm not kidding.
It's in your phone, it's in a car,
it's in your television, it runs your bank,
it runs most of the global economy, it runs air-traffic control systems,
nuclear submarines, it runs most of the Internet.
You use Linux every single day,
multiple times a day, and you don't even know it.
So if you're in the tech industry, you for sure have heard of Linus Torvalds
and almost none of you have ever heard of me.
(Laughter)
I'm Linus Torvalds's boss!
(Laughter)
I know what you're thinking.
Wow, this guy is the boss
of one of the 17 most influential guys of the century,
wrote the world's most prolific software.
Who else works for this guy. The person who created the Internet?
So first of all, no, Al Gore does not work for me.
(Laughter)
But let me show you a couple of others who do.
These two. Especially that little girl there.
That's my daughter. My 4½-year-old daughter, Nisha.
And what's funny is Nisha actually shares a lot in common with Linus Torvalds.
(Laughter)
No it's true, it's true.
First of all, they're both adorable.
(Laughter)
Second, they're both geniuses.
(Laughter)
And finally, neither of them listens to anything that I say.
(Laughter)
In other words, I'm nobody's boss.
But fortunately, Linus Torvalds doesn't really need a boss.
He's got this great mascot, this penguin.
And Linux really has done very successfully despite me.
And let me show you a few numbers,
just to give you an idea of what this looks like.
1.3 million smart phones running Linux
are activated every single day.
700,000 televisions are sold every single day running Linux.
92% of the world's high-performance computing systems
that predict climate change, forecast the weather,
run the CERN supercollider, are all running Linux.
85% of the world's global equity trading platforms run Linux.
The New York Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange,
the London Stock Exchange,
most of our economy runs on Linux.
1000 trillion dollars is the amount of transactions
that happen on just one Linux system, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
It runs Google, Facebook, Amazon, most of the Internet;
it is by far the world's most widely deployed software.
So, how does Linus do it? And why should you care, for that matter?
Well, he does it collaboratively,
by working with thousands of developers,
all across the world, in different countries,
performing a grand act of creation.
And I'm just a bit player in this grand play
that's been unfolding over the last 20 years.
But as a witness to all of this, and technically as Linus's boss,
I've learned some lessons that I'd like to share with you today,
so that you might become better collaborators,
so that you might achieve the same success
as someone like Linus and something like Linux.
And some of these lessons may surprise you.
The first lesson I learned: don't dream big, don't dream big.
This is an email from Linus Torvalds over 20 years ago,
announcing the creation of Linux.
"I'm not doing anything big, just something for fun."
(Laughter)
And what's interesting here, whether it was intentional or not,
Linus was paraphrasing a poet, Robert Frost, who said,
"Don't aim for success, if that's what you want.
Do what you love and believe in and it will follow."
And I think it's appropriate that Linus was paraphrasing a poem,
because what's happening behind thousands of computer screens
all over the world is a renaissance.
The Michelangelos and the da Vincis and the Raphaels of their day
are creating great poetry.
And they're doing it because they love it.
Linus felt so strongly about this that he wrote an entire book on it.
And he titled it "Just for Fun."
Because when you're doing this kind of grand creation and collaboration,
when you're doing it because you love it and you believe in it,
you can create great things.
And let me tell you,
there is a difference between a house-painter and da Vinci.
And the grand code poets who are writing this
truly believe in what they're doing.
It is making a huge difference throughout the world.
And because they believe in it so much, they don't care about lesson 2,
which is: give it all away. Give it away.
You see, Linux is open source.
Anybody can take and use it completely for free.
You don't have to ask permission, you can just take Linux,
grab it, build anything you want.
In fact the only thing you have to do is if you make changes to Linux,
and improve it, you have to share those changes with everybody else.
And when I tell people this, they think, "You guys are idiots."
You should have seen the crest-fallen look on my wife's face on our first date
when I told her I worked in a non-profit.
(Laughter)
Nobody can make any money giving things away, right?
Well, that's not true, and I'm going to prove it to you.
What if I showed you 3 companies:
one based entirely on free and open-source software,
one based partially on free and open-source software,
and one that's completely based on closed software,
they don't give anything away, they sell it.
What do you think the results from those companies would look like?
Well, here's what it would look like.
This is a chart showing Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft's results
for the last 5 years.
And at the top, Red Hat,
a software company that gives away free software,
that bases their entire company on free software self-service and support,
has gone up almost 200% in the last 5 years.
IBM, which all of you have heard of, it might surprise you to know
they sell billions of dollars of hardware
which contain almost entirely free software.
And Microsoft at the bottom sells closed software
that they create by themselves and sell for a price,
in the last half-decade they have returned almost no shareholder value.
So when I tell people this, they say, "OK, Jim, that makes sense, we get it,
but there's just one hole we can put into your argument.
I mean it makes sense, Red Hat's doing well,
this is a movement that we think is the future,
but what about Apple?"
(Laughter)
You think you all got me, right?
(Laughter)
How many people here have an iPhone?
Alright. I want you to do something with me.
Take it out, go into the Settings,
go into General, About and Legal Notices.
And you're going to see something interesting in there.
Inside of every iPhone, every iPad, there is free software.
You'll see the GNU public license from the Free Software Foundation,
you will see the names of prominent open-source developers,
you will see oodles and oodles of free software,
because Apple knows something that many people don't,
but that I'm showing you today.
Which is when you stand on the shoulders of giants,
when you use free software and take part in this grand collaboration,
you can innovate at ever higher levels.
And that's what Apple does and it's pretty smart.
So if anybody tells you you can't make money
by giving things away, you tell them they are wrong.
And then tell them about my next lesson.
The best way to get something done is not to have a plan.
(Laughter)
Don't have a plan.
The plan for Linux is there is no plan. Right?
Well, it seems counter-intuitive,
but you're not seeing the power of self-forming communities.
When you collaborate, you want people to create things organically.
And that's what happens within Linux.
Organically, communities come together to solve their problems
that if Linus Torvalds or me or anybody had tried to plan out,
they would never have thought of.
That's why Linux runs on a small hand-held phone
and also powers the world's largest supercomputers at the same time.
And what happens here
is an incredible cross-pollination of ideas,
where the person trying to save on battery life in a phone
by controlling the amount of power Linux uses
helps the guy running the world's biggest computer,
because the number one cost is not the hardware,
it's not the software, it's the power in cooling.
So by creating these self-forming communities,
they're exchanging these ideas incredibly, adding all this incredible value
and producing at a pace that's unprecedented.
And let me just show you how unprecedented that pace is.
10519, 6782.
That's the number of lines of code added to and subtracted from Linux
every single day.
A million lines of code were added to Linux just in the last year.
Homer's epic "Iliad": 15000 lines.
"War and Peace": about 450000 words.
Every single hour of every single day, 7 changes happen in Linux.
It is unprecedented and has resulted in over 10 billion dollars of value creation
over the last 20 years.
The most successful collaborative development project
in the history of computing.
407 companies, thousands of individuals coming together in harmony.
And speaking of harmony, that leads me to the next lesson, which is:
If you're working that fast, and with that many people
across this many cultures,
you'd think you'd have to be good at collaborating. Right?
And you'd think you'd have to be a pretty nice person
to get along with all of these people from different backgrounds.
Well, you would be wrong. You don't always have to be nice.
In fact, Linus Torvalds, sometimes he's not so nice!
(Laughter)
Did I mention he doesn't listen to anything I have to say?
But what Linus is doing here, is he's engaging in a flame war.
Flame wars are how coders often communicate.
They criticize each other, they defend their ideas,
they ridicule code.
In this world, code talks and BS walks. Right?
And you'd think this would be a bad way to create software.
Yelling at each other all the time, these guys are pretty mean.
Well, it's interesting, in 2003,
University of California, Berkeley, did a study about how ideas are created,
how you can create the best ideas.
They took a bunch of people and they put them into groups.
One group was given traditional brainstorming instructions.
No idea's a bad idea, don't criticize, all of that.
How many people here have brainstormed? Right. Of course.
Another group was given the instructions:
"Debate, rigorously defend your ideas."
And guess what.
The debate group didn't just do better, they crushed it.
They came up with an order of magnitude better ideas.
And so what does all of this mean?
How can you not dream big, give it away,
not have have a plan and be a jerk and get anything done collaboratively?
Maybe Linus Torvalds can get away with it.
But other people are catching onto this too.
And this is really the future of collaboration.
And I'm going to show you that by asking you a a quick question.
Who do you think said the following statements?
Code wins arguments.
The best idea and implementation should always win.
The hacker way is an approach to building
that involves continuous improvement and iteration.
Hackers believe that something can always be better
and that nothing is ever complete.
(Speaker: Laughter)
Sounds like something Linus Torvalds would say, right?
In fact, he's said things like this over and over again over the last 20 years.
But he didn't say it.
Mark Zuckerberg said this.
And what's more important than the fact that Mark Zuckerberg said it,
is when he said it.
Mark Zuckerberg said this on the eve of Facebook's IPO.
This guy was about to become a multi-billionaire.
And on the eve of the most anticipated financial event of the last decade, INTAC,
he didn't talk about price-earnings ratio or profitability.
Instead he wrote a letter titled:
"The Hacker Way: Code wins arguments, may the best idea and implementation win."
Because Mark Zuckerberg didn't have to be taught these lessons,
they were instinct.
When he created Facebook, he grabbed Linux,
he grabbed free software, and he created the world's largest social network.
And he was following a form of collaboration
that has introduced an entirely new genre
of the way that people can get things done.
And this new genre of collaboration can be summed up in a simple idea.
All of us are smarter than any one of us.
Because you see, there's a whole generation
of code poets out there, working furiously.
Poets who love what they do, who may not always get along,
but are creating the next Google and the next Facebook.
These individuals have created the coal and steel of the information age.
And instead of that coal and steel being owned by the Carnegies,
it's owned by everyone.
That is the future.
The future is a world in which you can enrich yourself,
while at the same time enriching others.
It's going to be a pretty good place.
And in that world,
and I have to admit I may be talking myself out of a job here,
you don't need a boss.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)