Reading 09: Emulating Linus' World

First, I will briefly note that I think Linus’ upbringing in a family of academics and his father’s involvement with the communist party were, as he admits, likely influential on his decision to open source his kernel software. In considering Bill Gates and Steve Jobs lives, their development in a pure capitalist environment led to their focus on economic payoffs from writing software. Although not a radical political ideologue, Linus’ exposure to communist teachings was likely crucial to his ambivalence towards making money on his software. However, I found the most interesting part of Linus’ upbringing was the academic environment that cultivated the development procedure of Linux.

In my previous post, I derided ESR for failing to consider the economic burden carried by the majority of his massive peer review open source network. While I still believe his argumentation about the strength of open source is weakened by not offering a method for supporting the masses of hackers, in reading Linus’ autobiography I recognized that worrying about economically supporting hackers carries an American bias about how society works. Linus was able to find the time to commit to learning, “scratching personal itches”, and eventually developing Linux because he was able to stay in school and perform poorly for eight years with relatively little cost of consequence. Since college is free in Finland, he essentially had a haven of lack of economic or administrative responsibility in his life which enabled him to hack endlessly. In America, first of all, you can’t really afford to meander through higher education at a substandard academic standing. Staying in school makes economic sense so long as you are increasing your worth to an employer who will then pay you enough to payback the cost of all that schooling. If you’re not at least breaking even, you have to get out. Linus essentially didn’t have this cost analysis in his society given that for eight years of college he only accumulated $5,000 in debt. Second, since college isn’t really a haven for ignoring responsibility in America, you have to hope you get a job which leaves enough free time to hack on the side. In other words, you get a job to pay the bills but your night job is your real passion. When your passion becomes your part-time night job, you’re not going to be as productive as someone who can afford to do it full-time. The Finnish education system allowed Linus the opportunity where a society focused on profit does not. In the post I mentioned earlier, I mentioned that it’s a privilege to be able to hack. It means you’ve had all your other needs met. In the US, that means that you are an individual who through luck or merit has acquired the freedom to hack. In Finland, the freedom to hack (or I guess do whatever else you would want to spend 8 years in college doing) is built into the organization of society and offered universally.

The economics of college tuition are known to be abysmal in the US, and I don’t necessarily have unique solutions, so I won’t dwell on that topic here. However, it is worth considering whether the unlimited unstructured free-time Linus turned his collegiate experience into would lead to reproducible success in today’s technological climate. My belief is that it would not. Linus himself makes the analogy between the increasing complexity of cars and computers. Early on, you could take your car apart and put it back together again by following some manuals. Similarly, in the days of Levy’s hardware hackers and to the 90s when Linus developed Linux, you could strip the machine bare and stare at its secrets. Today, both machines have become so complex that it’s unlikely you could learn by tinkering. The knowledge barrier to entry has grown significantly. For that reason, I think you still need some sort of formal education to prepare you to intimately understand a computer. However, I think formal education in the US has swung too far and the formal education has become the rigid formation of all your years in college. Personally, I’ve spent so much time doing projects and homework for required courses which have repetitive meaning or seemingly no connection to the curriculum, that I lose out on time to actually tinker, think, and explore. I think there’s a middle ground and automotive technicians have already faced a similar issue and developed a blueprint. Two-year technical training gets mechanics up to speed on the technical innards of the machines they will be working with, then they are empowered with the tools to choose specializations as they find interesting. Computer science needs a similar stripped-down curriculum whereby you get the training early on, then you specialize in theory, hardware, or data science in an amorphous curriculum your last two years.