Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  But the following night, I delivered my speech in the same room.

  I would have rather gone shopping. Well, not really…

  It’s not that I wasn’t prepared. Ordinarily I write my speech the day before, but this time I actually got a head start. It was a Monday night speech and on Saturday I had written it and set up the computer to project its slides. Everything looked really good. I had even put my speech on three different floppies, just to protect myself in case one of them might turn out bad. The one thing I hate more than speaking is speaking when something goes wrong. I even put my speech on the Internet, just in case all the floppies were bad.

  There was a Comdex-inspired traffic jam on the Strip so we arrived at the Venetian Hotel only a half-hour before I was due to begin. I was with Tove and the girls and some folks from the show. When we finally got into the building, we had problems getting access to the backstage area because one of the organizers had misplaced the security badges. I mean, everything went wrong.

  So finally we got inside. I would have been nervous if I were about to speak before forty people, let alone the biggest audience of my life. Then it happened.

  I discovered that the computer itself, which had been so painstakingly set up two days earlier, was nowhere to be found. It was insane. Someone mentioned that people had started lining up for the speech downstairs more than four hours in advance, and that the waiting area was packed to capacity. Meanwhile, we were running around like hens without heads, searching backstage for the machine.

  It was a normal desktop system with Star Office, one of the Linux office suites, installed. And I was supposed to just put in my floppy and go. Everything had been set up so that there wouldn’t even be any cables to attach. But the computer had vanished. Apparently the machine had somehow gotten mislabeled or something, so it was shipped back. Happily, I had my laptop with me and I had the actual slide file of my speech on the laptop and I did have Star Office installed.

  Because this was my laptop, I didn’t have all the right fonts. That meant that the last line on all my slides was missing. When I realized this, I thought: Who cares? I’m going to get through this alive. Then we had to hook up all the cables. I mean, literally, they started letting people in before everything was set up. I was up there, still trying to get it to work, as a flood of humanity washed into the humongous auditorium, filling every available seat and then filling the standing area along the sides. Luckily, they gave me the standing-ovation before I opened my mouth.

  I started out with some lame reference to the lawyer joke that Bill Gates used to open his speech. I gave a one-sentence hint about what then-secretive Transmeta was developing. It had been wildly rumored in the press that I would use the Comdex speech as an occasion to (finally) announce Transmeta’s chip. But we were just not ready. The main part of my speech simply involved ticking off the benefits of open source computing. I wasn’t in a mood to crack as many jokes as I ordinarily do. At one point, Daniela—who was sitting with Tove and Patricia in the first row—began a crying spell that was probably audible throughout Las Vegas’s casinos and strip clubs.

  That was not a speech that will go down in history among the great orations. Later, someone tried to cheer me up by informing me that Bill Gates, too, had been visibly nervous on the same stage the night before. However, his onstage apparatus had worked without a hitch. The trouble was, he had the U.S. Department of Justice breathing down his neck. I guess I came out ahead.

  It seemed like a strategy out of Journalism 101: Find the person who had been waiting the longest to hear Linus’s keynote, and hang out with him (undoubtedly, him) in line. What better way to gather insight into the dweebie hordes who follow Linus like he’s some sort of vendorware-clad God.

  At 5 P.M. I’m on an escalator descending into Geek Woodstock.

  At the head of the vast, snaking line is an intense computer science student from Walla Walla College who eagerly agrees to let me join him. He has been waiting, so far, two and a half hours to see Linus, and he will be waiting another two and a half hours before being let into the auditorium. His classmates, who are behind him in line, arrived in the queue maybe half an hour after he did. They drove down from Washington State with one of their professors and are sleeping in the gymnasium of a local high school. They all seem to have started their own Web design business. They seem to have conveniently divided up the universe of grownups into two groups—hackers and suits—and are constantly pointing out members of the latter category in the growing line, saying things like, “Man, look at all the suits here,” the way their Delta Tau Chi counterparts might survey a beach during spring break and observe, “Man, look at all the foxes here.” But like their Delta Tau Chi counterparts, they are doing all the usual horseplay—slapping each other high-fives, trading insults, although the insults all relate to motherboards or gigabytes.

  And then they talk about Linus. His name comes across capitalized, as in “LINUS wouldn’t work at a company that wasn’t going to be open source, He just wouldn’t.” They have been slavish scrutinizers of slashdot and other Web sites where rumors of Transmeta’s hushed goings-on circulate like the lurid details of a Hollywood starlets love life. This mania and the speculation/fascination isn’t happening only among the ardent groupies who arrived here first.

  I visit the men’s room and take my place at the only empty urinal, interrupting a conversation in progress.

  “This speech is going to be way boring compared to the Gates keynote,” says the fellow to my left.

  “What do you expect?” replies the other guy. “Linus is a hacker, not a suit. I mean, give him a break.”

  When we finally get into the auditorium, somehow we are not up front but toward the back of the middle. My line-mate from Walla Walla forgets, for a moment, about the excitement of seeing his hero live, and goes into a rage about not being in the first row, where he deserves to be. Soon, he is pointing out the suits in the audience. Even though we’re maybe seventy-five yards from the front, its possible to catch a glimpse of Linus on the darkened stage, seated at a computer. He quickly types into the computer while being surrounded by a few officials. What could be happening up there? Some sort of last-minute software demonstration?

  Eventually, Linus and the others leave the stage. Somehow Linus International Executive Director Maddog (Jon Hall) is introduced. My companion from Walla Walla gets visibly excited. “Check out the beard,” he says. Then, Maddog announces how pleased he is to introduce a man who is like a son to him. Linus reemerges and gets a big hairy hug from Maddog. Even from back in the cheap seats, I could tell he was nervous.

  “I wanted to start with a lawyer joke, but that was taken,” he says, a reference to antitrust-suit-plagued Bill Gates’s well-received opening the previous night: “Anybody heard any good lawyer jokes?”

  He proceeds to give a one-sentence hint at Transmeta’s secretive operation. Then the rest of his speech consists of rattling off the sentences that are flashed on slides high above his head, statements about the growing importance of open source. Nothing surprising. Nothing new.

  It is delivered in a tired-but-cheerful monotone. At one point, one of his daughters cries.

  In mid-sentence he says, “That’s my kid.” You could look up at the monitor and see the stage lighting reflecting off the beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Afterward, audience members line up for questions, He quickly declines to say which of the Linux word processing software he prefers, When someone asks him how many stuffed penguins he has at home, he answers: “Quite a few.” An audience member asks how he likes living in California, to which he responds by rhapsodizing about the weather, “It’s November and I’m still wearing shorts, In Helsinki I’d have lost my crown jewels by now.” A fan walks up to the microphone for audience questions and announces, simply, “Linus, you’re my hero.” To which Linus responds, as if he has heard the same statement a million times and answered it a million times: “Thanks,”

  After th
e questions are over, hundreds of people flood into the area below the podium, where Linus has now moved and is shaking as many hands as he possibly can.

  IX: Is the Linux Revolution Over?

  By Scott Berinato, PC Week

  “Thank you for calling. The Revolution is over. If you would like further information on Linux, please press one…”

  It appears Linus Torvalds has a handler, which must mean this whole Linux thing is mainstream, so forget about the revolution and get back to work on your Windows desktops.

  Once was a time when reporters could call the inventor of the Linux operating system at his office at cloak-and-dagger marketed Transmeta Corp., punch in his extension and receive a familiar declarative “Torvalds” from the man himself on the other end. He was patient and he answered your questions. He told you when he had no time. Sometimes he told you when you asked useless neophyte programmer questions. But he answered the phone.

  Today, when you call Transmeta and punch in his extension, a pleasant female voice greets you. “Thank you for calling Linus Torvalds, This voice mail does not accept messages, To contact him, please send a fax to…”

  What? And it starts to sink in: He’s not getting back to you. He’s had enough, He’s a celebrity and getting a quick interview with him now will be like getting a quick interview with that other big computer industry celebrity, The woman rattles off a fax number and you’re already thinking of hitting the old 0-# combo for a receptionist…

  “Our receptionists do not take messages for him, nor do they keep his calendar.” D’oh. She’s pleasant. The worst. “But they will gladly get your fax to him.” Uh-huh. And Bill will gladly break up Microsoft to appease David Boies.

  Okay, so the Linux revolution isn’t over, but like any revolution, the rag-tag riff-raff is being superseded by mainstream sympathizers. Suburban new wave supplanted urban punk rock. Wealthy landowners in the colonies rose up after the poor taxed man. (The wealthy landowners, by the way, later tried to foist on frontiersmen a whiskey tax not so different from the tea tax imposed on them a few years earlier.)

  In fact, it’s probably high time Linus stepped back. It was inevitable, really, given the number of press calls and the maddening range of topics he was fielding.

  Take his press Q+A session at the Linux World Expo in San Jose earlier this month. Torvalds, who agreed to the session because he simply didn’t have time to field the innumerable individual requests, first had to rattle off what were becoming familiar answers to familiar questions. Can open source work in the business world? Are you trying to rule software the way Bill Gates rules software? What do you think of Microsoft? What is open source? What is Linux? Why a penguin?

  Torvalds, by this point, was clearly entering the canned realm of sports figures with his answers. Think Tim Robbins in Bull Durham: “I just need to go out there and give 110 percent to try and help the team…”

  And beyond the redundant, the questions from journalists outside the tech world veered wildly. At one point during his press conference, the Finnish phenom was asked how he was going to capture the small and medium business market. (Typically Torvaldian retort: “I personally haven’t tried to capture anyone.”) Two questions later, an eager, I’ve-got-a-unique-angle-to-this-open-source-mess reporter asked Torvalds what he thought of corporations patenting agricultural genomes. (Typically quotable Torvaldian response: “I’m of two minds when it comes to patents. There are good bad ones and really bad ones.”)

  Programmers, heed this: If someone starts asking you about agricultural genomes, it’s likely time to get a handler.

  So maybe its a good thing that Linus doesn’t answer his phone anymore. Still, we’ll miss the candor and self-deprecation of Torvalds, which came across so genuinely to reporters used to burning their throats on the dry, pressurized-airplane-air marketing being blown by most companies. And we hope, if faxes do in fact reach his desk, and he does in fact respond to questions, he will keep the Torvaldian tone.

  Because if the faux-pleasant PR voices take over, this Linux thing won’t be nearly so much fun.

  Okay, I guess I owe Mr. Berinato an explanation, but not an apology.

  Anyone reading this column would assume the mounting pressures of my role as chief nerd had turned me into an asshole. But that’s wrong. I always was an asshole.

  I’ll start at the beginning. I think voice mail is evil. It is the perfect example of a bad technology. In fact it is the worst technology that exists, and I hate it with a passion. So at Transmeta we started out with a peruser voice mail system that allowed each employee to store twenty minutes worth of messages. After that, callers got the message saying the mailbox was full, please contact the receptionist. Mine was always full.

  I think it was the journalists who caused the backlash. They would badger the Transmeta receptionists because my voice mailbox was full. After the first hundred times, the receptionists started getting irritated. They knew I wasn’t interested and they didn’t want to be the ones telling people to fuck off.

  So I started deleting messages without listening to them, just so the front desk people wouldn’t get annoyed. Most of the time I would never listen to my messages, anyway. For one thing, people usually mumble their phone numbers into the recording, and I would have to listen fifteen times just to figure out what they’ve said. Also, I refuse to call people back if I have no reason to call them back. People would get a warm and fuzzy feeling that they had left a message. Until they realized I wouldn’t return their call.

  That’s when they would call the receptionist. The receptionist wouldn’t know what to say, so I would tell him or her to tell the caller to fax me. Faxes are as easy to ignore as voice mail, although at least with a fax you could make out the number, should you want to. I never wanted to.

  At first, the receptionist politely told callers to please send me a fax. Eventually, people caught on to the fact that I didn’t read the fax, and they would call back a week later and complain that they had already faxed me. So the receptionist again got caught in the middle. It wasn’t her job to handle my calls.

  Yes, Mr. Berinato’s generous description of me in the good old days before Linux took off notwithstanding, I truly always have been an asshole. This isn’t anything new.

  The fax solution didn’t last that long. In the end, they set up a special phone-messaging account for me that didn’t have voice mail. By this time Transmeta had hired a PR person who volunteered to handle my requests. They’re trained to do this, I’m told. They still tell me I should always call journalists back because, even if I don’t want to talk to them, reporters get a warm and fuzzy feeling that I returned their call. My reaction to that is: I don’t care about their warm and fuzzies.

  Okay. I do answer my own phone to callers who happen to call while I’m sitting at my desk. But that shouldn’t be interpreted as an attempt to appear accessible. And it certainly isn’t a political statement. The point about open source has never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more open to other people’s suggestions. That’s never been the issue. The issue is that even if I’m the blackest demon from Hell, even if I’m outright evil, people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves. It’s not about me being open, it’s about them having the power to ignore me. That’s important.

  There’s no “official” version of Linux. There’s my version and there’s everybody else’s version. The fact is, most people trust my version and rely on it as the de facto official version because they’ve seen me work for nine years on it. I was the original guy and people generally agree that I’ve been doing a good job. But let’s say I shave my head to display a 666 and say, “Bow before me because if you don’t I will smite thee!” They would just laugh in my face and say, “OK, we’ll just take this little kernel and do what we think is right.”

  People trust me. But the only reason they do is that so f
ar I’ve been trustworthy.

  That doesn’t mean I’m willing to listen to voice mail—or to anyone who happens to reach me on the phone. I’ve never felt that people should see me as this good guy who likes to respond to anyone who calls or sends me email. And while we’re on the subject, it’s strange to have these stories making me out to be this self-effacing monk or saint who just doesn’t care about money at all. I have tried over the years to dispel that myth, but my efforts never make it into print. I don’t want to be the person the press wants me to be.

  The fact is, I’ve always hated that self-effacing monk image because it’s so uncool. It’s a boring image. And it’s untrue.

  X

  Crawling out of my bedroom and into the spotlight, I quickly had to learn the sort of tricks of living that other people probably picked up en route to kindergarten. For example, I never could have anticipated how ridiculously seriously people would take me—or my every move. Here are two situations, both of them variations on a theme.

  Back at the university, I had a root account on my machine. Every account has a name associated with it. The name is used for informational purposes. So I named the root account on my machine Linus “God” Torvalds. I was God of that machine, which sat in my office at the university. Is that such a big deal?

  Now, when somebody “fingers” a machine under Linux, or Unix, they are checking to see who’s logged on to that machine. Due to the advent of firewalls, the act of fingering doesn’t take place much anymore. But years ago people would finger another’s machine to see if the user had logged on or had read his email. It was also a way of checking out someone’s “plan,” personal information the person had posted on their machine, sort of a predecessor to web pages. My plan always included the latest kernel version. So one way for people to figure out the version of the day was to finger my machine. Some people had even automated the process. They would finger me once an hour as a way of keeping up on version changes. Regardless, whenever someone fingered me, they would see that my root account was named Linus God Torvalds. This wasn’t a problem early on. Then I started getting emails from people who told me that was blasphemy. So I eventually changed it. These are people who take themselves too seriously, and that drives me crazy.