The OS Guerrillas
By Sam Williams
[This story originally published by Upside.com October 28, 1998 12:00 AM ET. Two corrections were inserted on Oct. 11, 2005 at 11:40 AM ET. Quoted sources include Don Marti and Bill Schoolcraft]
Michael Corleone: Soldiers are paid to fight; rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: It tells me the rebels could win.
I found their hideout in the back of a computer trade show at the San Francisco Cow Palace.
Amid a scene that could best be described as a cross between your average CompUSA and the Mos Eisley Spaceport, they sat crouched behind an assortment of dangling space heaters and water buckets carefully positioned to catch the rain drops falling through the leaky roof. A large banner hanging from the barn rafters screamed "Internet Support," but as I got closer, a smaller, panhandler-style cardboard sign belied the true intentions of this motley assemblage.
The sign read, "Linux Rules."
Viva la revolucion.
I have to admit. I didn't know too much about Linux. I mean, I'd read the Wired profile of Linus Torvalds back in '96. Like a lot of intellectual observers, I'd come to admire the notion that an open-code operating system, lovingly manicured by hackers from around the world, could someday overthrow the hegemony of the Windows empire. Still, I wasn't holding my breath waiting for it to happen.
When a posting about the Linux "InstallFest" finally came through on the List Foundation Web site, however, I decided it was time to shed my feigned neutrality and meet the folks behind this hidden movement.
As I played with a computer, admiring the quick responses of the Linux desktop, I couldn't help but feel a bit like a reporter visiting a Barcelona cafe in late 1936, listening in on conversations about the upcoming spring offensive.
Unfortunately, my Catalonian fantasy was short-lived. I quickly ran into Don Marti, a San Francisco computer consultant and one of the organizers of the InstallFest. He quickly deflated my preconceptions when he announced the new Linux party line, recently updated in the wake of last month's nonaggression pact between Intel, Netscape and North Carolina-based Linux vendor RedHat.
"People are talking about Linux users as hackers, subversives," Marti said. "But Linux is a business tool more than anything else. From what I've seen, the people who bring Linux into a company are usually the most dedicated employees. It's the people advocating proprietary systems that seem to be doing it primarily for résumé-building purposes."
Damn. And just when I bought a new set of khakis from the Banana Republic.
As Marti spoke on the marriage between open-source software and high-tech capitalism, I still detected a few signs of the uncompromising true believer lurking within. For one thing, there was the background. A 30-year-old programmer, Marti's hacking activities dated back to the days of the Commodore 64 and the 6502 assembly language. There were also occasional references to the "pure joy of hacking Linux."
And of course, there were obligatory allusions to the maximum leader.
"Linus Torvalds isn't just the world's greatest programmer. He's the world's greatest manager, too," said Marti at one point. "That's because he knows that Linux isn't just a hacking issue. It's a software management issue."
But of course. What revolution would be official without its very own cult of personality? Maybe all this talk about business tools and management was just a smokescreen to ward off annoying journalist types such as myself.
I decided to stick around. A few minutes later, I ran into Bill Schoolcraft [*], another true believer, but with a slightly different pedigree. A brawny 43-year-old steelworker wearing a purple tie-dyed shirt with the peace symbol on it, Bill had spent his entire adult life working on the San Francisco docks before discovering the liberating powers of the personal computer three years ago.
"A calmness came over me when I realized computers were just like any other machine. They just don't have grease all over them," Schoolcraft said.
At last. An honest-to-God member of the working proletariat, I thought to myself. I asked Bill how he became acquainted with the movement.
"I used to go to users meetings over at Coffeenet," Schoolcraft said. "I noticed there was always this same group who came in together, after my group was getting ready to leave. I finally went over and asked them what they were doing. They told me about Linux and asked me to stay for one of their meetings."
Bill said his first encounter with the Linux platform was nothing short of a revelation.
"I was extremely tired of Microsoft. I found myself reformatting [*] my system every weekend. I'd just hit a ceiling learning-wise and would run out of stuff to do with whatever version of Windows I had," he said. "My first introduction to Linux was scary. They were throwing so many things at me. I'm still trying to figure it out."
Schoolcraft said he has received steady support from members of the local Linux users collective, a group of San Francisco hackers who jokingly [heh, heh] refer to themselves as the CABAL (Consortium of All Bay Area Linux).
"The guys embrace me with unconditional love," Schoolcraft said. "I'm always coming to them with questions, but they won't give me the answers. They want me to learn on my own, and so far it's worked. My girlfriend's starting to wonder what happened to me. I went from being a blue-collar steelworker to obsessing about computers all the time."
Listening to Schoolcroft speak, I couldn't help but feel a small lump rising in the back of my throat. If a guy like Bill could liberate himself through Linux, maybe the revolution wasn't dead after all. All it needed was a new platform.
So before leaving, I grabbed as much free literature as I could, including directions to the Bay Area Linux Users' Web site, and headed back through the main portion of the computer bazaar, toward the door.
As I walked through the rain toward my car, I couldn't help but remember Marti's parting comments: "There's an enormous amount of stuff happening right now."
Indeed ... I wonder how many 486s it would take to build a defensible barricade.
Sam Williams is a freelance writer covering open source software and high-tech culture. His email address is sam@inow.com
Copyright © 1999, 2001 Sam Williams. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium if this notice is preserved.