Toll-free OS inventor is toast of Silicon Valley

There's a simple, guaranteed method of drawing a crowd in Silicon Valley: whatever event you're holding, invite Linus Torvalds to speak. Perhaps the only computer programmer who could truly be described as a celebrity (a shirtless photo of him even once popped up on the geek adulation website, www.geekchic.com), Mr Torvalds is an icon because he invented an operating system called Linux.

Last week, Mr Torvalds made an appearance on a discussion panel at a giant conference of Internet service providers in San Jose. The auditorium was packed. The panel, which included top honchos from Intel and Netscape, had been the object of hot rumour up and down the Valley - it looked like Linux, always an operating system with a kind of radical hipness, might be getting the mainstream respect many feel it deserves. But first, a little explanation is needed.

Operating systems are the soul of a computer, controlling its most basic functions and forming an interface between the user, and the silicon and circuit boards. Because operating systems define the relationship between human and ma chine, they have their own distinct personalities, often described as their "look and feel". Advocates of one system over another - Macintosh or Windows, Unix or Windows NT - can become as ardent protectors of their favoured OS, as people defending a friend from insult.

Creating an operating system is a monumental programming task, because of the depth and breadth of the project. In the early days of computing, small teams worked closely to produce an OS. Today, hundreds of programmers will contribute to a major commercial operating system like Windows 98. Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, came up with Linux on his own, as a university project when he was a 21-year-old student in Finland.

Then, it was an operating system for one man, working on one computer. Today, Linux runs many of the most critical computer systems at NASA, created the special effects in Titanic, keeps most Internet services online, and even will run on the tiny palmtop computer, the PalmPilot. That's astonishing in itself. But what's even more surprising, at least for the business world, is that Mr Torvalds - voluntarily - makes not a penny from Linux.

He's an enthusiastic advocate of "opensource" software, software in which the "code", the language of commands which computer programmers use to create a computer program, is freely available. Usually, when you buy a computer program, from an operating system to a word processer or database, the code is "proprietary", owned by the manufacturer and inaccessible to the user or other programmers. But with open-source software, other programmers are encouraged to grab the code and rework it, improve it, add some new function to it - then publish the code they've contributed so that others can test it, use it, or refine it further.

Mr Torvalds took Linux and copyrighted it under the open source "GPL", or general public licence, which means its code is available to everyone. Then he stuck Linux on the Internet and invited other programmers to download it, test drive it and change it. From the very beginning, other programmers liked what he'd produced and set to work hammering away at Mr Torvalds's code.

Linux as it now exists is the product of a massive collaborative effort to which thousands of individual programmers have contributed. The OS is widely recognised by programmers as one of the most stable, reliable and flexible operating systems available - and, of course, it's free (download it from http://www.linux.org). Or, if you want to get it on a CD with some user support, you can buy it for about $50 from little companies like Red Hat or S.U.S.E. (the latter is the most popular commercial version of Linux in Europe).

Because of its reliability, Linux runs an awful lot of the big servers at Internet service providers. Techies have sneaked it into government and large corporate systems as well, often without telling management, because management gets nervous at the idea that critical systems are running on a free product that nobody owns (leaving open the question of whom to sue in a crisis).

And last week? Intel and Netscape announced they had taken an equity stake in the tiny North Carolina company, Red Hat. That means that Red Hat now will get access to the same advance information on Intel's upcoming chip technologies as Microsoft. It means two of the biggest tech heavyweights are backing Linux as an OS for the corporate market. The in door for Linux is the server market for Internet and intranet applications - the kind of applications Netscape makes, while high-end chips for servers are what Intel most likes to sell.

All in all, an interesting little marriage. One which Mr Torvalds will watch from the side, of course, since he won't work in a Linux-related company himself - a matter of ethics for him, as he still makes the technical decisions about which changes go into the latest release of the OS. It's certainly not business as usual, and all the better because of that.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish- times.ie