By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 08/12/99

Linus Torvalds strides to the podium, his benign gaze untroubled by dozens of flashing camera strobes. He's late to the press conference. He had to take his kids to see the penguins, symbols of the software that made Torvalds famous.

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Torvalds is the Godfather of Code, the man from Finland who led the way in developing Linux, the operating system that bears his name. With the Linux penguin logo popping up all over the Internet, and major computer firms investing millions in Linux, Torvalds is everybody's favorite software wizard.

Meanwhile, on the LinuxWorld show floor, Jordan Hubbard sits at a booth populated by CD-ROM disks, books, and stuffed toys shaped like happy devils, but not too many reporters. There are a fair number of visitors to the show who recognize the cheerful demon logo and what it stands for. Hubbard's company, FreeBSD Inc., has a strong reputation among people in the know. Still, most of the glory and glamor of LinuxWorld pass him by.

Without bitterness, Hubbard concedes the obvious. ''We lost the PR war.''

You might call FreeBSD the other Linux. Like Linux, FreeBSD is an operating system modeled after Unix, the powerful, sophisticated system developed by AT&T Corp. in the 1970s. As the name implies, FreeBSD can be gotten for free, by download over the Internet, just like Linux. And as with Linux, the ''source code,'' the actual instructions written by programmers, is available, so people can modify the software as they see fit. Major Internet services like Yahoo run their network on FreeBSD. So does the FAST search engine in Waltham, the world's biggest with 200 million Web pages indexed.

BSD stands for Berkeley System Distribution, a version of Unix developed at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1991, some of the Berkeley developers decided to sell a version of their product that would run on desktop computers. They started a firm called BSDI and acquired a toll-free phone number - 1-800-ITS-UNIX. ''That really set AT&T's shorts on fire,'' says Hubbard.

AT&T sued; development of BSD languished. In the midst of it all, Hubbard and some others began work on a version of BSD that would be given away, source code and all, to anybody who wanted it. FreeBSD first appeared in late 1993, about the same time Linux was getting off the ground. But there was no hint of legal trouble in the Linux camp, while programmers around the world hesitated to embrace an open-software project that might be sued out of existence. Even after the case was settled in 1994, FreeBSD couldn't regain the lost momentum.

There was another, subtler problem that grew out of the worldview of the BSDers. They were hypersmart technology titans based at one of the world's great universities. They knew they could write code better than some ragtag band of volunteers scattered about the planet. And so the FreeBSD people froze out most contributions from interested outsiders. ''We were the snobs,'' Hubbard says. ''We were the ones that didn't let just anyone come in and hack to their hearts' content.''

Hubbard insists that the result is cleaner, tighter code. He may even be right, as if it matters.

Eric Raymond, a patron saint of the open software movement, says that the Linux development model created a worldwide legion of users and fans. It may be a sloppy way to build an operating system, but it guaranteed a ready market for the finished product.

By isolating itself from this community of coders, FreeBSD gravely damaged itself. ''The BSD people had a lot of advantages,'' Raymond said, but ''they got one thing wrong that completely overcame all their advantages. They got their sociology wrong.''

Future historians may forget that Torvalds wrote part of Linux. Instead, they'll recall that he coordinated the work of an international community of part-time programmers, transforming their efforts into a product that, for all its residual crudity, is a marvel of power and performance.

Meanwhile, Hubbard says times are good for FreeBSD. The success of Linux is attracting a steady flow of new users. FreeBSD is content to be a follower, Hubbard says, while Linux breaks the trail for free software. ''We're letting them walk through eight feet of snow first,'' Hubbard says.

Penguins, it seems, are better at that sort of thing than demons.

Hiawatha Bray is a member of the Globe Staff. He can be reached by e-mail at Bray@globe.com

This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 08/12/99.
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