If Linus Torvalds is the Thomas Edison of Linux, the inventor, then Larry Augustin wants to be its Henry Ford, the great mass-market builder. Augustin is the founder and president of VA Linux Systems (formerly VA Research), the Mountain View, CA company that is a leader in the nascent Linux-based hardware market. A Stanford University Ph.D., Augustin chummed around with Yahoo's David Filo and Jerry Yang before starting VA in 1993. His company has been in the news a lot lately; it recently obtained the rights to the Linux.com domain name; the company has been hiring key Linux kernel hackers, and it is expected to be one of the first Linux companies to go public. Augustin -- one of the great gossips of the Linux world -- recently took time out from a driving schedule to sit down for dinner with Linux Magazine contributor Lee Gomes. The conversation covered a wide terrain: the work habits of Linus Torvalds, how VA will survive in a world where everyone does Linux, the religious debates in the Linux community, and the characteristics of a certain company named Microsoft. It began, though, with the 36 year-old Augustin discussing one of the recent setbacks of the Open Source movement.

Linux Magazine: What can be learned from the Mozilla experience?

Larry Augustin: The basic lesson is that just taking any software project that's in trouble and making it Open Source doesn't magically fix it. It isn't a silver bullet.

LM: Was Netscape's action a sign of strength or weakness?

LA: I think it was a sign of weakness. Netscape was losing the market.Part of their response to Microsoft was to go Open Source. They weren't doing it from a position of leadership. When you're losing and you have to do something to win, you're open to more options. But if Netscape had been winning and was gaining market share, they wouldn't have done it.

LM: You call Linux the "Revenge of the Nerds." Why?

LA: Traditionally, when you've got software, you think of the software as coming from a company. When you think of a product like Microsoft Office or Access, it's Microsoft that releases it. Well, in the Open Source world, the software doesn't come from a company. It comes from programmers, from individuals. Rather than being a company project, software becomes identified with the individuals who create it. So a lot more of the credit goes to them.

Of course, really good products are rarely designed from the top down. A great example of what's wrong with the top-down design is the Chevy Vega. Did you ever read Lee Iacocca's book? He's got this entire chapter about the Vega. Apparently, General Motors' management decided it was going to have a small car to compete with the Japanese. So management came in and told the engineers, toldthe designers, "You're going to design a car that is this big, weighs this much, runs this fast, and by God, that's what it's going to be." So then there was this big push to bring the car out. It's funny, but the Vega holds the record for the shortest distance ever traveled on the GM test track by a prototype.

One of the things that management told the engineers was, "You're going to have an aluminum block engine." Well aluminum block engines warp very quickly. So to try and fix this, they put cast iron heads on the aluminum block engine. That just made the whole front end heavier. As a result, they had to beef up the front end of the car. But it went a half-mile on the test track and the front end fell off. So then they started bolting things on.

They ended up with a car that had this really tiny, crappy engine, that weighed a lot, and that was bigger than any of the competition's. It also cost more. So GM said, "What do we do now? We'll put chrome all over the damn thing and sell it as a luxury car!" So they put these big chrome stripes around it and it became this small luxury car. And anyone who's ever owned a Vega knows it's a disaster of a car!

LM: Do you think that this focus on individual engineering feats might be just a transitional thing right now, since more and more big companies are moving into Open Source?

LA: Perhaps. But I think it's a fundamental tenet of good software that behind any good software project, there's a very strong, talented lead engineer. So to the extent that Windows 2000 is in trouble, it's probably because the project is so big that there's not one person at the top who has the whole thing in his head.

LM: The idea that Windows 2000 will be Microsoft's Vietnam -- don't you think that might be just wishful thinking by the Linux community?

LA: To some extent, we like to pick on Microsoft. It's one of those easy targets. Is it as bad as we like to say it is? I don't know.

LM: Is Linux as good as you like to say it is?

LA: I think Linux isn't as far along as people say it is. Linux has got a lot of benefits, but one of my big concerns is that with all the hype, people will think Linux is going to solve all their problems. And when they go and try it, they'll find it doesn't get the job done.

LM: At the enterprise level, or at the user desktop level?

LA: Both. This is what happened to NT. Microsoft pushed NT as their enterprise-level product, and it wasn't ready. And so for three or four years, people have been trying to use NT in the enterprise, and it hasn't worked for them. It's getting a black eye. Well, what happens if people put Linux on their desktop and find it's hard to use? Or if they put it in places where they really need redundant fail-over, or high availability and Linux doesn't have those features? Then they'll say, 'Oh, this Linux thing, it doesn't do the job for me, it doesn't work."

LM: What do you think of Linux kernel hackers?

LA: I'm very envious of those guys. To me, that's the ultimate thing: being able to create new things like Linux or Apache; to have written some piece of software that everyone in the world wants to use. I used to think I sort of knew what was going on. But I've gone to dinner with Linus, David Miller, and Leonard Zubkoff, and I was completely out of my league. Over my head.

LM: What did they talk about?

LA: At dinner, Dave Miller was beating up Linus because of a 64-bit address space on Sparc. Linus had designed the memory management so that the top 1 MB out of 64 terabytes of address space couldn't be used. But Dave needed to figure out a way to use every bit of the address space -- and there was this one page that Linus had set aside as not being used.Dave had figured out a way to reclaim it! I did a Ph.D. in computer architecture at Stanford. And I have one or two patches in the Linux kernel. But these guys were over my head completely.

LM: Maybe I'm missing the point, but why did Linus reserve the page, and how did Dave reclaim it?

LA: I don't know. It was beyond me. I'd be sitting there in these conversations and I'd be completely silent, because this was completely beyond me.

LM: What do you think of the Free Software versus Open Source Software debate?

LA: Richard Stallman sees it fundamentally as a religious and political issue, that software should be free. It's a political statement; it's not an economic statement. I've always been of the economic bent. That is, Open Source Software works better. It produces better code. It provides more options for the customer. It's just better for the consumer, and that's the reason for using it. Not because of some political or religious argument.

LM: Do you think that Richard Stallman helps or hurts the movement?

LA: Both. Richard provides a guaranteed barometer. You always know how Richard's going to come down on an issue; he's your litmus test. On the other hand, he tries to sell things to people based on his political argument and it just doesn't carry any weight in the corporate world. It does not benefit Free Software when he makes outlandish religious arguments about why things should be free.

LM: Do you think that some companies are trying to take advantage of the hype surrounding Open Source?

LA: It bothers me when corporationstry to take advantage of the hype without really being open. I think Apple's release of pieces of Mac OS X was a great marketing move that fundamentally didn't release any real open technology. It's people taking advantage of Open Source, trying to get some benefit by association with the name.

LM: Does VA Research have any proprietary technology?

LA: Part of the reason I wanted to get into the hardware and systems business is that the temptation to do proprietary things with software is much lower. We can do things that are proprietary around the hardware and the system, while still keeping all of the software open. That gives us a way to differentiate ourselves without being as tempted to do proprietary software.

LM: But if you have a proprietary graphics chip, doesn't that go against the principles of Open Source?

LA: Well, it wouldn't be proprietary in the sense that the interfaces would be closed. When I say proprietary, I mean doing things that are unique to us, like a clustered system. Now in order to do that, we had to build some special hardware that connects it to the system. We're telling everyone how to work with that program, and we're releasing all the software around it. We may have some patents around the design of that hardware, but everyone can program it. Everyone can work with it.

LM: Do you have a fundamental moral problem with proprietary software?

LA: I don't have a fundamental moral problem with it. I've consulted in places that work on proprietary software. I think that economically and quality-wise, Open Source works better and I encourage people, as theywork on projects, to consider opening them up and looking at building their business models around support. People will pay for "free" software.