“So I started off helping him with the computer, and then I did my own stuff on the side.

“I think my grandfather wanted me to learn, so he made me help him,” he explains. Linus recalls that his grandfather “bought the Vic-20 for his own needs to do math,” but soon asked his young grandson to help. And it evolved further to gain widespread market acceptance, as seen in the snowballing adoption of Linux as an operating system for Web servers, and in its unexpectedly generous IPOs. It evolved to become a method for the continuous development of the best technology. It began as an ideology shared by software developers who believed that computer source code should be shared freely, with the General Public License-the anticopyright-as the movement’s powerful tool. What started out in my messy Helsinki bedroom has grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world. Linux is obviously the most successful example. Not only was it the most common operating system running server computers dishing out all the content on the World Wide Web, but its very development model-an intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer computer programmers-had grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world. From a party of one it now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antarctica, and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Suddenly it was infiltrating the corporate powerhouses controlling the planet. It had exploded from the small bedroom of its creator, Linus Torvalds, to attract a cultish following of near-militant geeks. Seemingly overnight, the Linux operating system caught the world’s attention. During the euphoria of the final years of the twentieth century, a revolution was happening among all the other revolutions.

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