Just for Fun

I.

The birth of version 1.0 meant something new for Linux: the need for public relations. I would have been just as happy to introduce the new version to the world pretty much the way I had introduced previous versions. I would write something on the newsgroup like "Version 1.0 is out. Deal with it." (Okay, not in those exact words.)

A lot of other people thought it was much more of a big deal. They wanted version 1.0 for marketing purposes. There were all these budding commercial companies that had started to sell Linux. To them, version 1.0 was important for psychological, not technical, reasons. I couldn't disagree. The fact is, it looks bad when you try and sell version 0.96 of an operating system.

I wanted it out because it was a milestone for me, and because it meant I could stop fixing bugs for awhile and go back to development. The companies and the Linux community wanted to foist it onto the public in a major way.

We needed a public relations strategy. I wasn't going to personally champion the effort. I wasn't interested in putting out press releases or making statements. Others thought it should be done that way, so others volunteered to pick up the torch. This was pretty much how Linux itself was done -- and somehow, it all actually worked.

Lars was one of the driving forces behind making that first official release a real event. He and a few others thought the university would be the most appropriate place to make the announcement, It made sense. My bedroom was too small. And it would have set a wrong precedent to host the announcement at a commercial site. So Lars volunteered to coordinate the event with the university. The computer sciences department at the University of Helsinki was small enough that he could just talk to the head of the department.

The University of Helsinki was more than happy to offer up the main auditorium of the computer sciences department for the introduction of Linux Version 1.0. And why not? How often does a university have anything worthy of television news?

I did agree to give a talk. But it bore none of the horror of my Ede experience. Okay, some things were harder, now that I think about it.

Like having my dad in the audience. And the fact that it was on Finnish TV. It was the first time I ever got the chance to see myself on television. Both of my parents were in the audience (but I'm fairly certain they weren't sitting together). Tove was there, too. It was the first time my dad met Tove, so for me it was more than just the announcement of Version 1.0. Since I was involved in the last-minute speech preparations, like making sure my slides were okay, I wasn't there when they actually met. That apparently happened when they were walking into the auditorium. Maybe I caught it out of the corner of my eye.

In that talk, and in virtually every other one over the next several years,I spoke not so much about the technology but about Open Source.It was nice. It changed some opinions about Linux inside the computer science department. Before that, Linux was something the computer science department was proud of, and mildly encouraged. But after the announcement, people within the department started taking Linux more seriously. After all, they had seen it on the news.

Over the years, some have suggested that the university was trying to take credit for Linux. That wasn't the case. The department had always been very supportive. They even gave me a job that enabled me to work on Linux on their time. And that was in the early days, so nobody was saying, " 'Let's push this because some day it will be world famous." But at the same time they were pleased to be a big part of the announcement. It provided great public relations. I know there are now more Swedish-speaking students in the computer sciences department, which had always been overshadowed by the Polytechnic University.

Success envy is considered a Finnish cultural characteristic. And as Linux became better known in the world at large, I got a lot of questions about whether I had problems with people at the university being envious of me. The opposite turned out to be true; they were very supportive. Early on they started getting rid of X terminals and installing PCs with Linux instead.

The announcement launched Linux into the above-the-radar zone in Finland, and it started generating publicity elsewhere, too. A lot of the early headlines came about because some journalist had stumbled over Linux and got excited about it. From a business standpoint, Version 1.0 was never very challenging to any of the big players. Linux was getting the market that Minix and Coherent had. But there was little attention outside that community, which was fine. It was far more attention than I had expected initially.

Regardless, journalists, mostly from trade publications, started knocking at my door -- literally. It didn't make Tove happy to wake up on a Saturday morning to find a Japanese reporter bearing gifts -- usually watches, as they probably heard somewhere that I have a thing for them -- and wanting to do an interview. It made her even less happy when I would invite them in. (It was a pattern I would repeat for years, until we made our new house a Journalist-Free Zone. In my least considerate moments, I would even forget to tell Tove that I had invited a journalist to our house for an interview -- and I would forget, too. The reporter would show up and Tove would have to entertain him or her until I made it home.) Then there were the fan websites that started popping up, such as the one based in France that primarily consists of a much-updated gallery of embarrassing photos of me. Like the one of me from a Spektrum meeting: I'm shirtless, drinking a beer, looking studly.

Not.

And it wasn't only journalists or Linux hacker types who were showing an interest. Suddenly, people with big expense accounts wanted to talk to me about their technology. Unix had long been seen as an operating system with vast potential, mostly because of its power and multitasking capabilities. So corporations that were interested in Unix started keeping an eye on Linux. One of those was the networking company Novell, which had started a skunkworks project based on Linux. It was a Unix desktop they evolved called Looking Glass. It looked nice, but it was up against a wall: It lacked the standard of the time, which was the Common Desktop Environment.

In August 1994, they said they would pay me to visit them in Orem, Utah, to talk to them about their desktop. Novell was offering me my big chance to see America, so I told them I would accept if they would pay for me to visit another U.S. city. Even as an unworldly Finn I kind of suspected that Orem -- and even Salt Lake City -- weren't quite representative of the rest of the country. They suggested Washington, D.C., but I didn't want to go there. I figured it would be just like any other capital. They suggested New York, but I thought it would be more interesting to go to California.

Inside Novell's headquarters, it was hard to determine just how serious people were about the project. (In the end, they ended up being not very serious at all; they eventually killed the project, and the nine people involved started up Caldera.) But I was getting my first taste of the United States, where I somehow figured I would live at some point in my life. Novell's commitment to Linux notwithstanding, the United States seemed to be the center of the growing technology universe.

My visit to the United States was a bit of a jolt. The first thing that struck me was how new everything was, compared to Europe. The Mormon Church had had its 150th anniversary a few years before my visit, so they had cleaned up the main temple. It was shining white. Coming from Europe, where all the churches are old and have the patina of time, I could only think of one thing when I saw the white temple: Disneyland. It looked like a fairy-tale castle, not a church. And in Orem I made the mistake of checking out the hotel's sauna. It was one of those porta-potty saunas, literally made of plastic, and it was barely hotter inside than outside. I came away from it thinking they can't do saunas in the United States and feeling a little homesick.

And I started learning the ropes. Just as visitors to Finland learn quickly not to start up conversations with random strangers in bars, I learned that in Utah -- and, I later learned, the rest of America -- you cannot rationally discuss the subject of abortion or rifles. There's a 50-percent chance that you'll get somebody who's very emotional about those issues, and it's easy to get into a big fight about something that shouldn't be fought about. People don't get hung up about those issues in Europe. The reason people get so defensive about their own positions in the United States is that they've heard the other position so much. There are probably more rifles per capita in Finland than in many other places, but they're mostly used for hunting. It's not a big thing.

Another thing I quickly learned during my first days on U.S. soil: Root beer sucks.[1]

After Utah, I Hew to San Francisco and really, really liked it. I spent so much time walking around the city that I developed a major case of sunburn and had to remain indoors for an entire day.

I remember walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, looking up at the Marin Headlands, excited about the possibility of hiking in those hills as soon as I crossed the bridge. But by the time I made it to the Marin side, I had lost all interest in walking anymore. I could never have predicted that six years later, almost to the day, I would be sitting at the crest of those windy Headlands, looking out on the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay, the bridge, the fog, and San Francisco itself, explaining all this to David's tape recorder.

It would take only a year for me to return to the United States. I came back to speak at DECUS, (Digital's User Group) in New Orleans. There were only forty people at the meeting, so it wasn't a terrible ordeal. Best of all, that's when I met Maddog, a.k.a, Jon Hall. He was a technical marketing person for Digital Unix and an old-time Unix user. He was responsible for sending me over for the talk. Maddog, who is known for his chest-length beard and his absurd sense of humor (not to mention his propensity to snore), heads Linux International, an organization that works to support Linux and Linux users. He's also a godfather of my daughter Patricia.

Another legacy of that New Orleans meeting: Maddog arranged for Digital to lend me an Alpha. That's how Linux got ported to something other than a PC. Before that time, people had ported Linux to other architectures. There was a port to a 68K, the Motorola 68000 machines used by Atari and Amiga. But in those cases Linux didn't work on both platforms at the same time. To make that version of scaling work, you rip out the pieces that don't work on the new platform and you write new pieces. But the Alpha was the first real port of Linux. Basically the same sources worked on both the PC and Alpha. You add an abstraction layer so that the same code gets compiled in two different ways to work on two different architectures. It's still the same code, but it ends up working on different architectures.

When we released Version 1.2 in March 1995, the kernel had grown to include 250,000 lines of code, the new magazine Linux Journal claimed a 10,000-reader circulation, and Linux was capable of running on Intel, Digital, and Sun SPARC processors. That was a big step.

II.

It's 1995 and there is a host of growing commercial versions, and Linux companies are attracting a strong following. The university has elevated me from a teaching assistant to a research assistant, which means more money and less time teaching. I'm slowly -- very slowly -- completing the coursework for my master's degree, which is about porting Linux to different architectures. Tove has introduced me to squash, and we have a weekly game; we're fairly evenly matched.

From this bliss, a problem emerges. It turns out that an opportunistic fellow from Boston has registered the trademark for the word Linux. Not only that, but he sent email to the Linux Journal and a few other Linux companies asking for 5 percent of their revenues as a "thank you" for the trademark.

When I heard about this, I felt a twinge of deja vu. The guy's name sounded familiar. I checked my email archives and saw that maybe a year and a half earlier he had sent me an unsolicited email in which he first asked me if I believed in God, and then said he had a tremendous business opportunity for me. This was before spamming became a global obsession, the innocent years before anyone thought to pollute the Internet with offers of get-rich-quick schemes. No, I hadn't bothered responding to the fellow's email, but because it was so unusual for its time, I saved it.

So we had a little crisis on our hands. We were hackers. Nobody thought about checking the trademark register.

The guy wasn't a professional trademark squatter. He apparently just did it this one time. Trademarks come in different categories, and he registered his in the computer category. You have to submit evidence with your trademark application, so he gave the trademark office a disk on which he claimed to have a program called Linux.

There was some panic. Everybody in the Linux community knew we would contest the trademark. The problem was, we didn't have an organization for putting up a good fight. There wasn't even enough money to hire a lawyer. None of the companies felt comfortable about laying down the required amount, which was $15,000. (Today they go through that in a month's worth of Mountain Dew.) But at the time, it was a considerable amount of money for a single company. So Linux Journal and some other companies decided to pump money into Linux International, which would fight the trademark. Linux International had been started in Australia by a person named Patrick D'Cruze who migrated to the United States in 1994 to help promote Linux worldwide. The year of the trademark dispute was the year when Maddog became its executive director. Everybody trusted him, and still does.

I was in Finland, trying to beat Tove in squash or to beat Avuton in snooker, and I had no interest in getting involved in this. I just wanted the entire nightmare to go away. My preference at the time was to just get rid of the trademark, to get it declared invalid because of prior use in the industry. We had enough paperwork to show that Linux had, in fact, a history of prior use. The trouble was, our lawyer convinced us that it would be a wasted effort, that we should not even try to get Linux declared a public domain instead of a trademark. The only way for it to really be in the public domain, he explained, was for it to become generic. And Linux at the time wasn't that generic. The trademark office probably wouldn't even consider it to be generic today. We could lose the battle, he said. Or if we invalidated the old trademark, somebody could possibly come along and trademark it anew.

The solution he suggested was to transfer the trademark to somebody else. My vote went to Linux International, but there was a lot of opposition to that. Linux International was young and unproven. People were worried about Linux International being taken over by commercial interests. (It hasn't happened, I might add.) There was also strong concern about who would eventually take over for Maddog if he were to step down.

So all eyes looked to me. The lawyer suggested that the legal arguments would be easier if the Linux trademark were to be transferred to me because I was the original user of the word. That's the strategy we took. We reached an out-of-court settlement because that seemed like the easiest and cheapest thing to do. Like most out-of-court settlements, the details can't be discussed. Not that I even know them. I was happily uninterested in it all.

When I went back to check my original email from the guy, I realized that it had nothing to do with patents. It was obvious that he just wanted to talk to me. Maybe he tried to contact me to get me to pay him. Or maybe, if I had shown myself to be a true believer and soul brother in his faith, he would have just given me the trademark. I don't know.

I accept the fact that some people are not morally all there. But what was more irritating at the time was the fact that the entire trademark system put this onus on me, who had done nothing wrong, to go out and fight the guy.

As a result of the messy squirmish, I hold the Linux trademark. What that means is, when companies like VA Linux file for an IPO, their prospectus has to mention the fact that the company doesn't even own the trademark for half of its name. (In that particular case, the company was involved in the legal process of getting approval from me to use the word Linux.) But I've gotten accustomed to that sort of thing.

The trademark episode was just an unexpected growing pain for Linux. And a distraction. But no sooner was it settled then another surfaced: An engineer at Intel's research lab in Portland, Oregon, said his company was using Linux in its exploration of new architectures. He asked me if I wanted to move there for a six-month internship.

Tove and I had spoken in vague terms about possibly living in the United States. She knew how much I had enjoyed my few visits there, root beer notwithstanding. We agreed that the opportunities -- not to mention the climate -- were better in America. (By the way, I am totally convinced that the U.S. system of motivating employees is far more realistic, and produces better results, than the European model. In Finland if a worker is much better than his colleagues, you give him just a little more money and keep it very quiet. In America, you give him a lot more money -- and it works.) The internship seemed like a great way of testing the waters, or, since it was in the Pacific Northwest, the rainwaters, and we agreed that I should pursue the opportunity. But I was ambivalent. I felt a bit uneasy about leaving school without having finished my master's. Something inside me, possibly the memory of my professor grandfather, didn't take to the notion of being a dropout. In the end, my feelings didn't even matter. The engineer's manager decided that it would be difficult for me to obtain the required six-month work permit from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for the internship.

So we stayed in Helsinki. By the time Finland's legendary revelers were toasting the arrival of New Year's Day, 1996, I was inching toward the master's degree finish line. I only needed to complete one small course to finish the credit requirements. And I also had to write my thesis. Ironically, it would be the first time I got any academic credit for my work on Linux, which had consumed most of my life throughout my college years.

The year 1996 brought with it a wake-up call. In egalitarian Finland, you get a state-mandated seniority raise after you've been at a job for three years. When I saw my first pay stub reflecting the new salary, I felt a jolt: I had been working at the university long enough to be given seniority. Would I spend my entire working career there? Was I destined to become my grandfather? Remember my description of him from earlier in this book: bald, overweight, and not smelling like anything. I started checking myself in the mirror with some regularity. My hairline was creeping back a couple of millimeters. Extra kilos seemed to have made their way to my once-skinny torso. I was twenty-six and for the first time in my life I was feeling old. I had been at the university for going on seven years; I knew I could graduate fairly quickly if I got my act together.

My ten-year-old daughter Kaley thinks it's the apex of super-stardom to have someone buy you a penguin. We are sitting around a campfire on a clear Sierra night when Linus explains that a Linux user group in Bristol, England, bought him a penguin. Kaley cannot imagine that he hasn't bothered to visit the creature. Then he elaborates: Actually, they didn't buy him a penguin, but instead sponsored one in his name. And the sponsorship lasts for a year, he thinks.

The Torvalds family is trying to understand the concept behind 'smores. Somebody looks up from his roasted marshmallow and makes the mistake of asking how the penguin came about as the planetary symbol of Linux in the first place.

"The penguin was my idea," says Tove. "Linus was trying to find a symbol for Linux because people were asking, 'Shouldn't there be a symbol?' He was thinking of things he'd seen. The Linux companies had their own symbols. One of the companies had a pink triangle as its symbol. But I knew that was the international symbol for gays, so I told him that had already been taken. He said he would like to have something nice, something sympathetic.

I thought about penguins. Linus had been bitten by a fairy penguin at a zoo in Australia. He likes to pet things. He's always poking at stuff like rattlesnakes. Those penguins at the zoo were about one foot high, and he just reached into the cage to pet one of them. He kind of played with his fingers as if they were fish. The penguin came at him, bit him, noticed he was not a fish. He got bitten by a penguin but he liked it anyway. I got the feeling he was sold on penguins after that. He wanted to see penguins wherever it was possible.

"So when he started looking for a symbol I said, 'Why don't you have a penguin because you fell in love with those penguins?' He said, 'Okay, I'll think about it.' "

Here's where Linus, sitting maybe three bodies away from Tove, shakes his head.

"No, it was not her idea," he says. "She's wrong."

This was a departure. Linus and Tove don't make a habit of disagreeing. Tove is astounding in her ability to deftly handle the responsibilities of the girls and the household -- and a famous husband fending off journalists with her karate skills. Linus seems downright cheerful about chipping in by occasionally folding laundry or doing his morning chore of making the cappuccino. Even during the stress of a ten-hour car trip with the on-again-off-again needs of a pair of young kids, Linus and Tove handle it all smoothly: Think of the marital equivalent of a well-crafted Scandinavian sofa bed.

We found the kink.

The story, according to Linus, is that while Tove may in fact have vaguely mentioned penguins at some early stage, it was in a conversation with two high-ranking Linux types that the icy creatures were first seriously considered as the operating system's official mascot.

Tove has her take on this version. "He thought it wasn't a good idea after all, because it was my idea. He went on thinking about a possible symbol. Then we were in Boston with Maddog and Henry Hall. They started talking about the symbol. I said to them, 'What about a penguin. Do you think it's nice?' They said yes. I think that made Linus think it might be a good idea after all."

"Henry Hall said he knew an artist who could draw it for him, but that never happened. The next thing I knew, Linus had asked on the Internet if there were people who wanted to send in pictures of penguins."

He chose a version by Larry Ewing, a graphic artist who works at the Institute for Scientific Computing at Texas A&M University.

But this wasn't to be just any penguin. Above all, Linus wanted one that looked happy, as if it had just polished off a pitcher of beer and then had the best sex of its life. Even beyond that stipulation, he wanted one that was distinct. Hence, while all other penguins have black beaks and feet, those features are orange on the Linux mascot, making it look almost like a penguin whose father was a duck. As if Daffy Duck got a little kwazy on a cruise to Antarctica and had a wild one-night-stand with some native fowl.

III.

News of my decision to work for Transmeta Corporation was greeted with the same reaction in the Linux community as was the news that Tove and I had figured out how to conceive a child and were expecting one at the end of 1996.

When word leaked out in the spring that Tove was pregnant, the more vocal among Linux user newsgroup participants wanted to know how I planned on balancing the demands of Linux maintenance with those of a family. A few months later, when it became known that I would (finally) be leaving the University of Helsinki to work for the secretive Transmeta in Silicon Valley, the big, worldly debate centered on whether I could possibly keep true to my open source philosophy in a dreaded commercial environment, as opposed to a neutral academic institution. Transmeta was partly funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, folks declared in protest; some claimed it must be an elaborate scam for taking control of Linux.

I'm not saying those aren't valid concerns for loyal members of the Linux community, but it's just ... gimme a break! The fact is, neither the birth of Patricia in December 1996 (and Daniela sixteen months later and Celeste forty-eight months later) nor my job at Transmeta, which began in February 1997, has caused the downfall of Linux. I felt all along that if anything were to negatively affect my work with Linux, I would have taken the obvious necessary step of turning it all over to somebody I trust.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the spring of 1996, just as the weather was breaking, I finished the last of my required coursework for my master's. It was about this time that I heard from Peter Anvin, the Linux community member who three years earlier had organized the online collection that helped me pay off my first PC. Like everybody else who prowled the Linux newsgroups, he knew I would soon be graduating. He had been working at Transmeta for about a year, and approached his boss to explain that he knew this guy in Finland who might be good for the company. He came to meet with me briefly while he was visiting his mother in Sweden. He talked up Transmeta, which was pretty hard to do since it was in stealth mode and he couldn't tell me much of anything. The rumor among programmers was only that it was involved in developing "programmable chips." At the very least it was great to meet Peter in person.

A week after he returned to California, he sent me an email asking when I could come. This was hugely different from the experience I had had with Intel a year earlier, when an engineer wanted to hire me for an internship but it never happened because of the paperwork issues.

It would be fun just to get a trip to California, I thought.

This was the first job interview of my life. I didn't have a CV. I didn't know what Transmeta was doing; it was in a strange land.

I was more worried about the implications of moving to the United States than about getting the job itself, so I didn't even think of my meetings as being interviews. What mattered more, it seemed, was to learn what these guys were up to. It was a fairly strange interview situation.

After the first day, I went back to my hotel across the street from Transmeta's office-park headquarters. In my jet-lagged state I thought it was all interesting, but I also thought that the folks at Transmeta were crazy. At that point the company didn't have any silicon at all. No hardware. Everything was done with a simulator, and the demonstration of the simulation booting into Windows 3.11 and running solitaire did little to convince me that anything was going to happen. After that first day I wondered if it wasn't all a waste. I distinctly remember thinking: Maybe this isn't going to turn out -- either as a technological innovation for Transmeta or a job for me.

I literally slept on it. Actually, it wasn't much of a sleep. I lay in bed thinking about Transmeta's plans. Then I started fantasizing about having a backyard palm tree. Then I started ruminating over what I had seen on the simulator. It was a memorable, fitful night, but nothing like the frostbitten anxiety of Ede.

By morning, I was somewhat excited. By the end of the second day, I was very excited. That's when the stress began.

Before accepting Transmeta's offer, I talked it over with various people. When word got out that I was considering the job, I received a number of other offers. In Finland I got an offer from Tele, which was using Linux in some capacity. Through Maddog I got an offer at Digital. (No offense, but Boston in winter isn't a whole lot better than Helsinki in winter. Okay, maybe it is.) I talked to some of the Red Hat people. They offered me a job and said they would pay better than Transmeta was paying, even though they had no idea what the proposed^{2} salary was because I hadn't even discussed money with the company. The Red Hat crowd said they would even top Transmeta's stock options, whatever they would be. But I wasn't interested in working for any particular Linux company -- even one that was fortunate enough to be located in the middle of North Carolina.

In the end, I got five job offers without ever formally looking for a job. Transmeta's was the most exciting, by far.

I said yes. It felt weird. The next thing I did was tell the university I would be leaving. That's when the stress really began. For me, it was a giant step that meant there was no turning back. We were having a new child, moving to a new country, and I was leaving the safe nest of the University of Helsinki -- but first I had to write my thesis. In retrospect, I guess getting all those changes over at once was a good idea. But it was madness.

There was no formal announcement (why should there be?). Just word circulating on the Internet, and the aforementioned debate about whether I would be able to remain true to Linux and free software in the evil corporate environment, and between the changing of diapers. Back then, people had this view of Linux as something that was mainly developed by university students, not settled-down people. I guess it was understandable that they would be nervous.

I wrote my thesis over a long weekend and turned it in minutes before taking Tove to the hospital to deliver Patricia, who was born forty hours later. That was December 5th, 1996. Being a father seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The next several weeks we were busy with Patricia and constantly worrying about obtaining the approvals for our U.S. visa paperwork, which was taking forever. We figured it would help if we were married, so sometime in January -- I always have to ask Tove the date -- we went to a government office to be officially wed.

We had three guests: Tove's parents and my mother. (My dad was in Moscow). It was a strange time. At some point we shipped most of our belongings to the United States without knowing when we would be able to fly out. To say good-bye to all of our friends, we hosted a house cooling party, the reverse of a housewarming. Twenty people crammed into the small, recently emptied one-bedroom apartment. In good Finnish tradition, everybody got drunk.

Our visas finally arrived and on February 17, 1997, we boarded a morning flight to San Francisco. I remember the temperature in Helsinki: 0 degrees Fahrenheit. I remember Tove's family at the airport, crying when we said good-bye -- they're very close. I don't remember if my family was there or not. They must have been. Or maybe not.

We landed in the United States and made our way through customs carrying a baby and two cats. Peter Anvin was there to greet us as we rented a car for the drive down to Santa Clara, to the apartment complex we had chosen during an apartment-hunting trip we had taken a few months earlier. It all felt surreal, particularly the 70-degree difference in climate from Finland.

Our belongings wouldn't arrive for another two months. We spent the first night sleeping on an air mattress we had brought with us. The next day we went out to buy a real bed. Until our furniture made it to California, Patricia had to sleep in her carriage. It was something that really annoyed Tove, although David points out that it is sort of cyclical, referring to the first three months of my life that were spent in a laundry basket. We didn't do much cooking (we still don't) and didn't know where to go for dinner. We ate most of our meals either at the food court of a local shopping mall or at a fast-food place. I remember telling Tove we had to find some new places to eat.

With the move and getting accustomed to the new job at Transmeta, I didn't have a lot of time to devote to Linux during those first couple of months. The new job occupied much of my time and my after-work hours were spent with Tove and Patricia, trying to get to know the new area. It was a fairly busy time. We had absolutely no money. I had this great salary, but everything went toward getting furniture. Buying our cars was a hassle because we had no way of establishing a credit history. We even endured hassles proving we were capable of paying for telephone service.

My computer was on a ship that was inching its way around the Horn of Africa. It was the first period of time when I was quiet on the Web, and my absence worried a lot of people. It was like, Okay, now he's working for a commercial company....

Many people asked outright: Does this mean Linux will die off as a free system? I explained that under my agreement with Transmeta I could continue doing Linux. And that I wasn't going to go away. (I couldn't think of a way to say that I was just catching my breath.)

Life in Transmetaland.

One of the problems with explaining to people how the move to the States and into the commercial world wasn't going to change me was the fact that Transmeta was just about the most secretive company around. There was only one rule concerning what you could talk about, and that rule was very simple: "Say nothing." Which just made Linux people sometimes wonder what kind of strange cult I had joined, and whether I was ever coming back. I couldn't even tell my mother what I was up to -- not that she would have been interested.

What I was doing at Transmeta wasn't all that strange. The first thing I actually ended up doing was fixing some of the Linux problems that Transmeta had. The company was using a lot of multiprocessor Linux machines. I had never personally worked on the Linux SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) issues, and it turned out that many things didn't really work the way they were supposed to. I took this as a personal affront, and had to fix it, of course.

But my real work was actually being part of the Transmeta softball team.

Oh, I mean software team. We didn't play all that much softball. None of the Silicon Valley leagues would let us join unless we agreed to tell them what we were up to.

I don't know how familiar people are with Transmeta. As I'm typing this, we're actually in our silent period before the (please, God, buy our stock) IPO, and we're no longer secret, although we're back in our stealth mode due to SEC rules about initial public offerings. Let's hope that by the time this book is out, everybody and his dog has heard about Transmeta and bought (subliminal message: STOCK) one or more of our CPUs. Because that's what Transmeta does -- CPU's. Hardware.

But Transmeta does more than just hardware. Which is just as well because, quite frankly, I wouldn't know a transistor from a diode even if one kicked me in the head. What Transmeta does is simple hardware that relies on clever software to make a simple CPU look like much more than it really is -- like a standard Intel-compatible X86, in fact. And with the hardware being made smaller and simpler, the CPU ends up having fewer transistors, which in turn makes it use less power, which as everybody realizes will become increasingly more important in a mobile world. This clever software is why Transmeta has a rather large software team, and why I was there.

This all fit me quite well. A non-Linux company that did something that was technically quite interesting (understatement of the year -- I still don't know of another company that has ever seriously even tried to do what Transmeta does). And it was in an area that I knew intimately: low-level programming of the quite esoteric 80X86 family of CPU's. As you undoubtedly recall, it was the act of getting to know that CPU in the first personal computer I owned that had started the whole Linux project in the first place.

The fact that Transmeta wasn't a Linux company was also important to me. Don't get me wrong: I loved fixing Linux problems at Transmeta, and I've been involved in several internal projects about Linux. (In fact, these days it's probably impossible to find a serious technology company without such projects.) But at Transmeta, Linux was secondary -- which was just what I wanted. I could continue to do Linux, but I didn't feel I would have to make the technical compromises that would favor the company's goals over Linux itself. I could continue to think of Linux as a hobby in which only technology mattered, and nothing else held sway over my decisions.

So during the day, I worked for Transmeta. I wrote and maintained the "x86 interpreter" that we still use today (although others maintain it now). The interpreter is basically the piece of Transmeta software that looks at Intel instructions one at a time, and executes them (i.e., it "interprets" the language of the 80x86 architecture, one instruction at a time). I ended up doing other things later, but that's how I got into the strange and wonderful world of hardware emulation.

During the night, I slept.

My deal with Tramsmeta was clear: I had been given vague assurances that I could work on Linux during work hours too. Trust me, I took full advantage of that.

A lot of people believe in working long days and doing double, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.

IV.

Welcome to Silicon Valley. One of the first things I got to do upon landing in this strange galaxy was to meet the stars.

I received an email from Steve Jobs's secretary about how he'd like to meet me and could I spare an hour or two. Not knowing what it was all about, I said sure.

The meeting was at Apple's headquarters on Infinity Loop Drive. It was with Jobs and his chief technical guy, Avie Tevanian. This was when Apple was starting work on OS X, the Unix-based operating system that wasn't released until September 2000. There wasn't much formality to the meeting. Basically, Jobs started off by trying to tell me that on the desktop there were just two players, Microsoft and Apple, and that he thought that the best thing I could do for Linux was to get in bed with Apple and try to get the open source people behind Mac OS X.

I stuck around because I wanted to learn about the new operating system. It's based on Mach, the microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University. In the mid-1990s the Mach was expected to be the ultimate operating system, and a lot of people were interested in it. In fact, IBM and Apple used Mach as the basis for their ill-fated Taligent joint-venture operating system.

Jobs made a big point of the fact that Mach's low-level kernel is open source. He sort of played down the Haw in the setup: Who cares if the basic operating system, the real low-core stuff, is open source if you then have the Mac layer on top, which is not open source?

He had no way of knowing that my personal opinion of Mach is not very high. Frankly, I think it's a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and managed to even make up a few of its own. One of the arguments against microkernels has always been performance. So a lot of people did research projects aimed at determining how to turn microkernels into something that performs really well. All of the resulting recommendations made it into Mach. As a result, it became a very complicated system with rules of its own. And it still doesn't perform that well.

Avie Tevanian had been one of the Mach people when it was a university project. It was kind of interesting, discussing what he and Steve saw as the issues. At the same time, we disagreed fairly fundamentally on technical matters. I really didn't think there was a reason for open source or Linux people to get involved. Sure, I could understand why they wanted to get more open source developers into their system; they were seeing the momentum build behind Linux. But I don't think they were seeing it quite enough. I don't think Jobs realized that Linux would potentially have more users than Apple, although it's a very different user base. And I don't think Steve would be quite as eager to dismiss Linux as a desktop system today as he was three years ago.

I explained why I didn't like Mach. For understandable reasons that didn't go over very well. They'd certainly heard the arguments before. Obviously, I was very set on Linux and Tevanian was

very set on Mach. It was interesting to see how they discussed some of the technical issues. One of the immediate problems I could see involved how they planned on supporting old Mac applications in the new operating system. They wanted to do all the old stuff with a compatibility layer. All the old Mac applications would run within one new tacked-on process. But one of the major shortcomings of the old Mac is the lack of memory protection, and this solution does nothing to solve that problem. Only the new Mac applications would have memory protection. It didn't make sense to me.

We had basic differences in how we viewed the world. Steve was Steve, exactly as the press portrays him. He was interested in his own goals, and especially the marketing side. I was interested in the technical side, and not very interested in either his goals or his arguments. His main argument was that if I wanted to get the desktop market I should come join forces with Apple. My reaction was: Why should I care? Why would I be interested in the Apple story? I didn't think there was anything interesting in Apple. And my goal in life was not to take over the desktop market. (Sure, it's going to happen, but it's never been my goal.)

He didn't use very many arguments. He just basically took it for granted that I would be interested. He was clueless, unable to imagine that there could be entire segments of the human race who weren't the least bit concerned about increasing the Mac's market share. I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had -- or how big a market Microsoft has. And I can't blame him for not knowing in advance how much I dislike Mach.

But even though I disagreed with almost everything he said, I kind of liked him.

Then there was the first time I met Bill Joy. I walked out on him.

Okay, to be fair, I didn't realize who he was when I first met him. It was at the Jini preview. Jini is Sun Microsystems' interaction agent language, an extension to Java. It's for doing seamless networking between completely different systems. You could have a printer that was Jini-aware, and anything on the same network that spoke Jini would be able to use Jini automatically.

Sun Microsystems had invited me and about a dozen other open source people and technical people to a private preannouncement briefing that would take place in a hotel room in downtown San Jose during Java World. The reason we were invited: They were doing Jini under what, at Sun Microystems, passes for open source.

When I went there, I kind of knew Bill Joy was there. He had been the key person behind BSD Unix and later joined Sun as chief scientist. I had never met him before. He just came up to me and said he was Bill Joy and I kind of didn't react to it. I hadn't come there to meet him but to see what Sun thought about open source and how they were going to enter open source. A few minutes later, Bill himself was explaining the reasons for making it open source and they had a limited demonstration of the system.

Then they started explaining their licensing. It was horrible. Just stupid. Basically it boiled down to the fact that if somebody else wanted to use the system in even a half-commercial way, it wouldn't be open source at all. I thought it was a completely idiotic idea. I was really upset about the fact that, on the invitation, they had touted their open-sourceness. It was open source in the sense that you could read the source, but if you wanted to make any modifications or make it part of your infrastructure, you had to license it from Sun. If somebody at Red Hat wanted to make the latest Red Hat CD version of Linux Jini-aware, the company would have to license the Jini technology from Sun.

I asked a few questions to see if I had understood it correctly.

Then I walked out on them.

I was just so pissed off that they had gotten people there by claiming open-sourceness that after I found out what it was all about I literally said, "Forget it, I'm not interested," and left.

My understanding was that they wanted me there simply to inform me and that maybe if I had been enthusiastic they would have liked a press quote or something. That plan backfired. But maybe they will learn. Apparently people later convinced them to open source their Star Office. So I guess it all just takes time.

I'm told that they continued the meeting that day and had dinner, and that everybody else stayed.

The second time I met Bill Joy turned out to be a much better experience. About a year and a half later he invited me out for sushi.

His secretary phoned me to set up a time. Bill lives and works in Colorado and apparently spends one week out of each month in Silicon Valley. We went to Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto. It's one of the better sushi places in the Valley. Of course it's nothing like Blowfish Sushi in San Francisco, with its nonstop Japanese animations to look at, or Tokyo Go Go in the Mission, with its hip crowd, or Sushi Ran in Sausalito, with its important patrons, or Seto Sushi in Sunnyvale, which has the best spicy tuna sushi of them all.

Okay, we were at Fuki Sushi, and it was kind of fun because Bill was trying to get real wasabi. I didn't know this at the time, but in most Japanese restaurants in the United States, what passes for wasabi is actually just colored horseradish. It turns out the wasabi plant lives only in Japanese streams and is difficult to grow commercially. Bill tried to explain this to the waitress and she really didn't get the concept. She was Japanese, but she thought that wasabi was wasabi. He asked her to ask the chefs.

The back-and-forth was sort of funny. This was a social dinner. He basically made it clear that if I wanted to work for Sun I could just give him the word and he would make something happen. But that was not the main thing. It was more of an opportunity to talk about the issues. He started reminiscing about how he'd been the maintainer of BSD Unix for five years and how he had grown to appreciate having the commercial side around him through Sun. He talked about how important it was to have the kind of commercial support that a company like Sun could provide. I found it fun and interesting to hear him talk about the early days of Unix. It didn't make one bit of difference to me that we were never able to taste genuine wasabi. I distinctly remember thinking he was probably the nicest and most interesting of the high-profile people I had met in Silicon Valley.

Flash forward three years. I pick up Wired magazine only to encounter his horribly negative article about technology entitled "The Future Doesn't Need US." I was kind of disappointed. Obviously, the future doesn't need us. But he didn't have to be so negative about it.

I don't want to tear apart his article line by line, but I have a general belief that the saddest thing that could ever happen to humanity would be that we would just go on and on, as opposed to evolving. Bill seemed to feel that advances like genetic modification make us lose our humanity. Everybody always thinks that something different is inhuman because right now we are human. But as we continue to evolve with whatever happens, in 10,000 years we will not be human according to today's standards. We will just be a different form of human.

In Bill's article, he seemed afraid of that. My feeling is that it's unnatural-and fruitless-to try and curb evolution. Instead of trying to find two different kinds of dog to produce the desired offspring, obviously we will resort to genetics; it seems inevitable that this will happen for people, too. In my opinion, changing the human race through genetics is preferable to leaving the status quo. I think that, in the bigger picture, it would be a hell of a lot more interesting to ensure the continued evolution of not just humans but of society, in whatever direction it goes. You can't stop technology, and you can't stop the advances we make in our knowledge of how our universe works and how humans are designed. It's all moving so fast that some people, like Bill Joy, find it scary. But I see it as part of our natural evolution.

I disagree with Joy about how we should deal with the future the same way I disagreed with his notion of open source. I disagreed with Steve Jobs about technology. It sounds like I spent my first years in Silicon Valley being disagreeable, but that's not true. I was doing a lot of coding and taking Patricia to the petting zoo and in general broadening my horizons-like learning the awful truth about wasabi.

V.

Our overnight success.

Do you ever read advocacy newsgroups? The entire purpose of their existence is to advocate something, which means to put something else down. So if you go on them you find nothing but "My system is better than your system" nonsense. It's its own form of online masturbation.

The reason I mention advocacy newsgroups is that, despite their absurdity, they do offer a clue to what is happening. So when corporations first decided that Linux was the darling of operating systems, the growing commercial support wasn't discussed first in the press or at the checkout counter at Fry's Electronics, but on advocacy newsgroups.

Let me back up. In the spring of 1998, a third blonde entered my world: Daniela Yolanda Torvalds got produced on April 16th, making her the first Torvalds to be a U.S. citizen. She and Patricia are sixteen months apart, the same as Sara and me. But I guarantee they won't be as embattled as my sister and I were growing up -- certainly not with Tove's moderating influence. Or her karate skills.

Two weeks before Daniela's birth, the open source community -- which had until recently been called the free software community -- got its biggest boost ever. That's when Netscape opened up the source code for its browser technology in a project named Mozilla. On the one hand, the news got everyone on the newsgroups excited because it raised the visibility of open source. But it also made a lot of people, including me, fairly nervous. Netscape was in trouble at the time, thanks in large part to Microsoft, and the opening up of its browser was seen as a somewhat desperate measure. (Ironically, the browser's roots were in open source. It began as a project at the University of Illinois.)

People on the newsgroups were expressing their fears that Netscape would muck things up and give open source a bad name.

Now there would be two big-name open source projects -- Netscape and Linux -- and the reasoning was that if Netscape, the better known of the two, were to fail, the reputation would impact Linux, too.

And to a large degree, Netscape did fail. The company had trouble getting open source developers interested in the project for the longest time. It was just a huge body of code and the only people who could get into that code were Netscape people.

The project was somewhat doomed not only because of its size but also, because Netscape wasn't able to make everything available as open source -- only the development version, which was fairly broken at the time the company released it. The company couldn't GPL the browser because not all the code was theirs -- the Java portion was licensed from Sun, for example. Not everyone on the newsgroups agreed with Netscape's license. On the whole, the license was fairly mellow, but if you're someone like Richard Stallman you don't like mellow.

I thought it was wonderful that Netscape took this step, but I didn't view it as a personal achievement. I remember that Eric Raymond took it really personally. He was extremely happy about it. His paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," which did an excellent job of explaining the open source philosophy and history, had been released the year before and was cited as one of the reasons behind the Netscape decision. He was actively pushing open source. He had been at Netscape on a number of occasions, trying to convince them to open up their browser. I was there only once. In fact, Eric had visited a number of companies bearing the open source message. I was interested in the technology, not the evangelization.

Within 24 hours of Mozilla being released, an Australian team that called itself the Mozilla Crypto Group created the cryptography module. Back then, non-U.S. citizens were prohibited from using encryption generated on U.S. soil. Suddenly, somebody from Australia had done the work, so non-U.S. citizens were in a position to use it. But there was a catch. Given the export restrictions of the time, the Mozilla project couldn't take the Australian code. If it made its way to the United States, it couldn't be reexported. This meant that one of the first successes of the great Netscape experiment couldn't become part of Mozilla.

We were all worried because Netscape had received a lot of news coverage. And for that first year, people walked on eggshells. Nobody wanted to say anything negative about Netscape for fear that it would result in bad press for open source and scare other companies away.

But two months after Nerscape's move, Sun Microsystems joined the game by declaring that it would become the first major hardware vendor to join Linux International. It would support Linux on its servers. The company with the unimpressive licensing scheme for its Jini project had decided that Linux was worth taking seriously. The newsgroups overflowed with self-congratulations. With Sun on board, Linux developments made their way from Internet discussions to the trade press. Outsiders were suddenly interested, but mostly technical outsiders.

Then came IBM.

IBM has been known for being fairly stodgy, so everybody was taken by surprise when the company announced in June that it would sell and support Apache, the most popular commercial Linux version used for Web servers.You could run Apache on AIX, IBM's UNIX, and that's probably what a lot of people who bought IBM did. That's how Apache got to IBM's attention. Somebody must have noticed that most of those server machines ended up using Apache, so they calculated that they would sell more servers if they had the in-house expertise to support such customers. Or maybe they were acting on feedback from customers who said they would buy IBM machines but would run Apache.

It's relatively easy to install Linux on a computer. But for most companies, one of the big issues, historically, has been: Who do we blame when something goes wrong? Obviously, there are the Linux companies like Red Hat that provide the support, but it was a psychological advantage for customers to know that IBM would be there for them. When IBM started getting into open source, a lot of people suspected it was just lip service. But that turned out not to be the case. IBM dipped its toes in the water by running and supporting Linux on its server boxes and then sort of waded all the way in. Next came the small PC servers. Then, the regular PCs. Then, the laptops. The company has announced it will spend $1 billion on Linux this year.

IBM did a lot of its Linux work on its own. I think one of the reasons they liked Linux was because they could just do what they wanted to do without having to deal with licensing issues. It's a company that has had its share of hassles. IBM was screwed over by Microsoft after the two companies jointly developed the OS/2 operating system, which turned out to be just Windows on steroids. Microsoft failed to support OS/2 because it wasn't interested in sharing the market. Windows NT is what came out of it from the Microsoft side. But OS/2 never paid back to IBM the billions of dollars poured into it. And IBM was plagued with the licensing issues over Java. I think they were just happy not to have all that aggravation with Linux.

There's no doubt that IBM was Linux's biggest coup. And it generated only excitement on the newsgroups -- not the sort of paranoia provoked by the Netscape announcement, or any of the seething anticommercialism that has periodically (okay: frequently) divided Linux enthusiasts.

By July, Informix announced that it would port its databases to Linux, meaning that even if you used Linux to operate your computer, you could run an Informix database. It wasn't such a big deal at the time. The company had been having financial trouble, but it was still one of the top three database vendors. Linux people were mildly happy about the development, and were writing self-congratulatory essays in Linux advocacy groups.

Within weeks, from out of nowhere, Oracle followed suit. Oracle dominated databases. Long before the announcement there had been rumors (on the newsgroups) about the company having some internal ports to Linux. And, since Oracle is synonymous with Unix servers, it wasn't such a major leap to Linux. But if you followed the newsgroups, we had definitely entered the big time. The Oracle announcement had a huge psychological impact, even if its technical impact was zero.

Like the IBM announcement before it, Oracle's big move was felt not only by the Linux community but by the folks who are commonly referred to as management decision-makers, although some people prefer the term "suits." No longer would they be able to say that they couldn't use Linux because their business depends on databases.

While the news was gratifying, it didn't change my life. Tove and I were juggling two adorable kids. Most of my nonfamily hours were spent on Linux maintenance, both at home and in the office. To keep from favoring anyone version of Linux, I used Red Hat at work and SuSE,a European version, at home. At one point I felt I wasn't getting enough exercise, so I decided to ride my bicycle the six miles between our apartment and Transmeta's headquarters.It was on a Monday. There were no hills to climb, but a strong wind blew in the wrong direction, making it more challenging than I wanted. By the time I left work ten hours later, the wind had shifted so that it was still in the wrong direction. I phoned Tove and she picked me up. Needless to say, biking-to-work didn't happen again.

I add this innocuous detail only to illustrate that the Linux developments weren't affecting my daily life. Most of the activity was taking place at corporations. Technical people, who had long known about Linux were being approached by their companies' leaders who had been seeing articles about Linux in the trade press, or hearing about it. They would ask their technical folks what the fuss was all about. Then, once they learned the benefits, they would make the decision to have their servers run Linux.

The situation was playing out in information-technology departments throughout the world, although most of it took place in the United States. It was rarely a decision based on the non-cost of Linux, because the software itself actually represents a small part of such an investment. The service and support are much more costly. What tended to sway the suits were the simple technical arguments: Linux was stronger than the competition, which consisted of Windows NT and the various flavors of Unix. And, importantly, people just hate having to do things the way Microsoft or anybody else says they have to do them. You can do things with Linux that you can't do with the competition. The original people who used Linux did so because they could get access to sources in ways they couldn't with commercial software.

From that perspective, things hadn't changed much since I had released Version 0.01 from my bedroom. Linux was more flexible than other systems out there. You got to be your own boss. And, at least in the case of Web servers, it didn't contain the "bloat" -- the many unnecessary features -- that make up competing operating systems.

Another thing Linux had in its favor: Despite its growing popularity as an operating system for Web servers, it really didn't occupy a niche. This is important as a way of understanding Linux's success.

Mainframe computers were a niche. Unix in general was a series of niches -- the U.S. Department of Defense super-computer niche, the banking niche. The folks selling operating systems for mainframes and other big systems made money because they were charging a lot for their operating systems. Then Microsoft came along and charged ninety bucks. Microsoft didn't go after the banking niche or any other niche, but suddenly it was everywhere. It was like getting invaded by locusts. It's hard to get rid of that kind of invasion. (Not that locusts are bad. I like all animals.)

It's a lot better to be everywhere and take over every niche, and that's what Microsoft did. Think of a fluid organism that flows into any place it can find. If one niche is lost, it's not a big deal. The organism surrounds the world, flowing into anything that's interested.

The same thing is happening with Linux today. It flows into anything that's interested. Linux doesn't have just one niche. It's small and flexible and finds its way into many places. You find it in supercomputers, at important places like the U.S. Government's Fermilabs, or NASA. But that's kind of an outflowing of the server space. Which is an outflowing of the desktop space -- which is where I got started. And at the same time you'll find Linux in embedded devices, everything from antilock brakes to watches.

Watch it flow.

Meanwhile, there's a great advantage to grass roots. The best and the brightest of the next generation are using your product because you are the thing that makes that generation excited. In an earlier generation, it wasn't so much Microsoft and DOS but PCs that got people excited. If you were into PCs, you were into DOS. There wasn't much choice.

And that was a huge advantage for spreading Microsoft.

If you look at the brightest young kids around, they're not all doing Linux, but a lot of them are. Sure, one of the reasons that the open source philosophy and Linux both have major followings in universities is simple: the antiestablishment sentiment. (The same antiestablishment sentiment that made such a huge impact on my dad's life.) It's the Big, Evil Microsoft Corporation & Wicked, Greedy, Too-Fucking-Rich Bill Gates vs. the We're-In-It-for-the-Love-and-Free-Software-for-Everybody & the Self-Effacing (Seeming) Folk Hero Linus B. Torvalds thing. Those kids graduate and take jobs in corporations, where they bring with them their love for Linux.

So folks who've ventured into the depths of Microsoft tell me they've seen my face on dartboards. My only comment: How could anybody possibly miss my nose?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. IBM's big announcement in the spring of 1998 was followed by similar announcements by every major hardware vendor. By August, Forbes magazine had "discovered" our little world by putting a picture of me on the cover with the words, "Peace, Love, Software." As company after company made an (inevitable) commitment to Linux, you no longer had to peruse the advocacy newsgroups to read the tea leaves.

VI.

Linux had captured the planet's heart like some improbable Olympic gold medalist from an unrecognizable third-world nation.

I was the poster boy. In a press interview, Eric Raymond explained that part of my appeal (or whatever) was that I was "less visibly odd than a lot of other hackers." Okay. That's one hacker's opinion. Not everybody liked the situation. Richard Stallman campaigned to change the name Linux to gnu/Linux, using the logic that I had relied on the GNU gcc compiler and other free software tools and applications to get Linux off the ground. Others were growing increasingly irritated by the fact that Linux was finding a home in the corporate realm.

The press was playing up the dichotomy between the Idealists and the Pragmatists (not my terms!) among Linux's now hundreds of thousands of participants. Under that division, those who feared that Linux's ideals were incompatible with the goals of capitalism were dubbed the idealists. I led the pragmatists. But I saw such analysis as journalistic nonsense -- a simplistic attempt to fit everything neatly into a world of black vs. white. (I have the same problem with the way folks view the Linux phenomenon as a Linux vs. Microsoft war, when in fact it's something else entirely, something far more wide-reaching. It's a more organic way of spreading technology, knowledge, wealth, and having fun than the world of commerce has ever known.)

To me, it was a non-issue. Without commercial interests, how else would Linux flow into new markets? How else would it create opportunities for innovations? How else would it be able to reach the people who want an alternative -- a free alternative -- to the bad technology that's out there? What more realistic way for open source to take hold than through the sponsorship of corporations? And what better way of getting some of the less interesting work accomplished, boring stuff like maintenance and support, than doing it inside companies?

Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which fuels so much of society's technological advancement, be excluded -- provided that they play by the rules? Open source can do nothing but improve the technology that companies create, and maybe make them less greedy.

And even if we wanted to stop the forces of commercialism, what could we do? I was not willing to suggest we hide, go underground, refuse to talk to commercial people.

Anticommercial sentiments have always been a part of the open source community, but it wasn't until Linux became a household word among low-tech households that there was a lot at stake. The newsgroups were aflame with the paranoid rantings of some of the vocal crazies. None of the Linux developers I interacted with were worried at all. But others raged on about how Red Hat or some other company would pervert the notions of open source, and about how some people were losing their idealism.

To some degree, it's probably true that some open source folks stood to get diverted from their idealism. But while certain people saw that as a losing proposition, I felt that it simply gave us more choice. Technical people who were worried about things like feeding their kids now had an option, for example. You can still be as idealistic as you've always been or you can choose to be part of the new commercial breed. You don't lose anything by having somebody else come in and give you a new option. Before, obviously you couldn't choose anything but being pure.

By the way, I've never felt that I was in the idealistic camp. Sure I've always seen open source as a way of making the world a better place. But more than that, I see it as a way of having fun. That's not very idealistic.

And I have always thought that idealistic people are interesting, but kind of boring and sometimes scary.

In order to hold a very strong opinion, you have to exclude all the other opinions. And that means you have to become unreasonable. This is one of the problems I have with American politics vis-a-vis European politics. In the American version of the game, you draw the enemy lines and the skill rests on one side's ability to be divisive. European politicians tend to win by demonstrating they can foster cooperation.

So I'm stuck with the conciliatory approach. The only time I was ever nervous about commercialism was very early on, when Linux didn't have much of a name. At that point, if commercial people had coopted Linux, there would have been nothing I could do. But that's obviously not the case now. One concern raised in newsgroup flames amid the activity of 1998 was that commercial people wouldn't give anything back. To some extent, I had to trust the new corporate players as much as Linux developers were trusting me. And they proved themselves to be trustworthy. They haven't held back. So far it's been very positive.

As poster boy, holder of the Linux trademark, maintainer of the Linux kernel, I felt a growing sense of responsibility. I felt increasingly responsible for the fact that millions of people now relied on Linux, and immense pressure to make sure it worked as reliably as possible. It was important to me to help corporations understand what open source was all about. There was no war, as far as I was concerned, between the greedy corporations and the altruistic hackers.

No, I wasn't giving up my ideals by meeting with Intel when they asked me to help them deal with the Pentium FO OF lockup bug ("Pentium FO OF bug?" I hear you ask. Yeah, it's us whacky engineers, making up whacky names again. "FO OF" is the hexadecimal representation of the first two bytes of an illegal instruction sequence that made Pentium CPUs lock up. Thus the name). No, it wasn't hypocritical to promote the wonders of open source code while collecting a salary from a company that was so closed it wouldn't even tell people what it was doing. The fact is, I respected, and still do, the low-power chip Transmeta was developing, and I saw it as the most interesting technology project out there -- and the one with the broadest possible implications. And, for the record, I was part of an effort to get the company to release at least some of its code.

I felt pressure to hold my ground within the open source community as someone who could be trusted from both a technology standpoint and an ethical standpoint. It was important to me not to take sides among competing Linux companies. No, I wasn't selling out by accepting stock options that Red Hat was kind enough to offer me as thanks. But it did make sense to turn down the entrepreneur in London who was offering me $10 million just to lend my name to his fledgling Linux company as a board member. He couldn't fathom that I would turn down such a huge amount for such little heavy lifting. It was like, "What part of ten million dollars don't you understand?"

It hadn't occurred to me that I might face such issues. And Linux's newfound popularity brought with it some tricky times not just for me but for the entire virtual community. In fact, as open source code gained the world's attention in 1998, one of the big debates dealt with the name itself. Until then we had referred to the phenomenon of sharing software, under such licenses as the GP, as "free software," and in general referred to the "free software movement." The term has its roots in the Free Software Foundation, which was founded by Richard Stallman in 1985 to promote free software projects such as GNU, the free Unix he launched. Suddenly, evangelizers like Eric Raymond were finding that journalists were confused. Did the word "free" mean it didn't cost anything? Did it mean "free" as in no restrictions? Did it mean "free" as in freedom? It turned out that Brian Behlendorf, who was talking to journalists on behalf of Apache, was encountering similar frustrations. After weeks of private email exchanges in which I was not a participant but was merely cc:ed (I wasn't interested in the political side), a consensus was reached: We would refer to it as "open" instead of "free." Hence, the free software movement became the open source movement -- for people who preferred to see it as a movement, which I guess it was. However, the Free Software Foundation is still called the Free Software Foundation, and Richard Stallman is still the psychological mastermind behind it.

As one of the de facto leaders of that movement, I was increasingly in demand. Every time my phone rang at Transmeta -- and it rang all the time those days -- it meant one of two things: Either a journalist wanted to interview me, or the organizers of a conference wanted me to speak. In order to spread the word about open source and Linux, I felt obligated to do both. Take a shy math wiz, put him on the greet-and-grin circuit for a populist cause, and you've created a folk hero. Forget what Eric Raymond said about me being less visibly odd than a lot of hackers. A big part of my appeal (or whatever you want to call it) is that I wasn't Bill Gates.

Journalists seemed to love the fact that, while Gates lived in a high-tech lakeside mansion, I was tripping over my daughters' playthings in our new location -- a three-bedroom ranch house of a duplex with bad plumbing in boring Santa Clara. And that I drove a boring Pontiac. And answered my own phone. Who wouldn't love me?

As Linux came to be viewed as a real threat to Microsoft -- and at the time of Microsoft's antitrust woes, it sure needed at least the appearance of a real threat -- the press jumped on every development as if it were covering World War III. Somebody leaked the "Halloween Document," an internal Microsoft memo indicating that the company was concerned about Linux. Soon Steve Balmer was quoted as saying, "Sure, I'm worried." The fact was, even if Microsoft stood to benefit by playing up the competition its Windows NT was getting from Linux, the reality was that the competition would only get more intense.

I didn't have to stand on a soap box and say horrible things about Microsoft. What would be the point? Events just play themselves out, and they played themselves out in favor of Linux. Journalists loved it all. The Softspoken (like a fox) David vs. the Monopolistic, Meanspirited Goliath. And, since I'm being completely candid, I actually enjoyed talking about it all to reporters. I like to call journalists scum, but I found most of my interviews to be fun. The reporters typically were interested in our story -- who wouldn't root for the underdog?

Once they got their fill of the Amoeba-that-Destroyed-Microsoft plot (note: in the interest of full disclosure, this sentence has been spell-checked by a Microsoft product), journalists wanted to understand the concept of open source. That message was taking less and less time to get across, since people could now see examples of it in action. What seemed to amaze them next was the administration of Linux. They couldn't grasp how the largest collaborative project in the history of humanity could possibly be managed so effectively when the average thirty-person company typically degenerates into something resembling barnyard chaos.

Somebody coined the phrase "Benevolent Dictator" to describe how I ran the whole thing. The first time I heard the term, all I could think of was some sunny-nation general with a dark mustache handing out bananas to his starving masses. I don't know if I feel comfortable with the Benevolent Dictator image. I control the Linux kernel, the foundation of it all, because, so far, everybody connected with Linux trusts me more than they trust anyone else. My method for managing the project with hundreds of thousands of developers is the same as it was when I coded away in my bedroom: I don't proactively delegate as much as I wait for people to come forward and volunteer to take over things. It started when I divested myself of the responsibilities I found less interesting, like the user-level code. People stepped forward and offered to take over the subsystems. Everything filters up to me through the maintainers of those subsystems.

I approve or disapprove of their work, but mostly I let things happen naturally. If two people are maintaining similar kinds of things, I accept both of them to see which gets used. Sometimes they both get used but wind up taking different paths. Once, there was intense competition between two people who insisted on sending patches that fought each other's patches. I refused to accept patches from either, until one of the developers lost interest. That's how King Solomon would have handled things if he ran a preschool.

Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That's when you get the best results.

My approach made headlines.

But the irony here is that while my Linux management style, such as it is, was earning high marks in the press, I was an undeniable failure during my brief stint as a manager at Transmeta. At one point, it was decided that I should manage a team of developers. I flopped. As anyone who has ventured into my junk heap of an office knows, I'm totally disorganized. I had trouble managing the weekly progress meetings, the performance reviews, the action items. After three months it became obvious that my management style wasn't doing anything to help Transmeta, despite the praise I was getting from journalists for the way I was running Linux.

Meanwhile, the press kept pounding away at another issue: fragmentation. Those who have followed the rocky, unhappy history of Unix know about the endless bickering between Unix vendors. The question came up all the time in 1998: Would history repeat itself in the world of Linux? My answer was always that while there undoubtedly is bickering among Linux vendors, it can't lead to the fragmentation that has kept Unix a perennial almost-been. The problem with Unix is that competing vendors wasted years implementing similar features, simply because they didn't have access to the same source base. Developing the same features independently not only cost Unix years but it also led to bloody infighting. Sure, I would tell the press, Linux vendors don't host regularly scheduled Love-Ins. But there is and will continue to be less fragmentation inside the Linux community than in the Unix community, because even Linux vendors who are not friendly can see the same source base and can reuse each other's work. The source code is a repository from which anyone can draw.

The more journalists started grasping such concepts, the more I liked meeting them. (Unlike the journalists I remember from my youth in Helsinki, most of them in the United States in the 1990s were sober.) I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to debate with them.

But speaking was another matter entirely. I'm not what you'd call a natural performer. Remember: I'm the fellow who barely left his bedroom throughout his childhood. I never was very good at even writing speeches, so I always waited until the night before an event to prepare.

Somehow, that didn't seem to matter. Typically, I would step out to the podium and people would rise to their feet and applaud even before I opened my mouth. I don't want to sound unappreciative, but I've always found that to be an embarrassing situation. Anything you say sounds wrong, even my standard, "Thanks, Now Please Sit Down." I'm open to suggestions.

But not all the calls were from journalists or conference organizers. One night I was sitting at home with Tove. We were reading to the girls. The phone rang.

I answered: "Torvalds."

"Uh, Is this the Linux guy?"

"Yes."

Two seconds of silence. Click.

Another night a fellow from Las Vegas phoned me at home, trying to get me to sign on with some Linux T-shirt business.

The obvious solution would have been to get an unlisted phone number. I didn't bother to do that when we first moved to California because it was more expensive than having a listed number. I've since learned the price you pay for being so frugal, and am now unlisted. Once, before I got de-listed, David misplaced my home number and phoned directory assistance. He asked for my number, and the operator who provided it said with great astonishment, "He's listed? With all his millions?"

But no, there weren't millions. Millions of Linux users, sure. Not millions of dollars for Linus.

And that was perfectly fine.

VII.

Most days I wake up thinking I'm the luckiest bastard alive. I don't remember if Wednesday, August 11, 1999 was one of those days, but it should have been.

It was the second day of the Linux World convention and trade show which had been taking place at the San Jose Convention Center. Dirk Hohndel, who is CEO of SuSE and traveled from Germany for the trade show, had spent the night on the guest bed in our family room. I've known him for years. He's one of the old XFree86 people, and is on the graphics side of Linux. He's also Daniela's godfather. I woke up, made cappuccino for Tove and Dirk, read everything in the San Jose Mercury News except the sports pages and the classified ads -- like I always do -- and then we piled into the Toyota Rav4 for the ten-mile trip to downtown San Jose.

I remember shaking a lot of hands.

This was the day that Red Hat would be going public. The company had years earlier given me stock options, and had only recently sent me some paperwork that I never bothered to look at. It sat somewhere in a stack of papers near my computer. I remember I really wanted Red Hat to do well. It wasn't so much a matter of being excited about the options -- I didn't quite realize what they meant. I was extremely jazzed for another reason. In many respects, the IPO's success would be a validation of Linux. So I was a bit nervous that morning, but I wasn't the only one. The market had been doing poorly for weeks, and people wondered whether or not Red Hat would even pull off its IPO.

The "liquidity event" did, in fact, happen. We got word on the conference floor that Red Hat's initial public offering came in at $15. Or was it $18? I don't remember. The important thing was that it ended the first day of trading at $35. Nothing record-breaking, but it was okay.

I remember driving home with Tove and Dirk in the car, first feeling relieved. Then, when I thought about the money, growing excited. Only when we were stuck in Northbound traffic on Highway 101 did it strike me that in one day I had gone from basically zero to half a million dollars. My heart started beating faster. It was elation tempered with disbelief.

I was clueless about stock and decided I needed to find out what to do next. So I phoned Larry Augustin, VA Linux's CEO. I told him he was the only person I knew who had a clue about how stock works. My exact words: "Do you have like a stockbroker or somebody that you trust because I don't want to go on eBay?"

Red Hat had given me options -- not an outright grant of stock. I didn't know what to do about exercising them. I knew there might be a lockup period but I didn't know if it applied to me, and I hadn't thought about the tax consequences. Larry, who is good at this sort of thing and who knows a lot of people, got me in touch with this guy at Lehman Brothers, who shouldn't have been handling me at all because I wasn't a big customer. He promised to find out what I should do. Meanwhile, two days after the IPO, I got an email from someone in Red Hat's Human Resources Department, or their lawyer, in which they mentioned something about the stock having split before the IPO. I knew nothing about it. So I tracked down the manila envelope containing all the stock option paperwork I had never bothered to read, and there it was, in plain (for legalese) English: My options had magically doubled.

My half-million dollars was actually a million dollars!

Regardless of the image that has caught on in the press, of me as a selfless geek-for-the-masses living under a vow of poverty, I was, frankly, delirious.

There, I said it.

I sat down and read all the Red Hat papers. Yes, I was subject to a 180-day lockup. Do you have any idea how long 180 days can be when you're a first-time millionaire on paper?

Now I had a new sport (or a sport, period): keeping track of Red Hat's stock price, which continued escalating during the following six months. It went up gradually and jumped a few times and just grew and grew. At one point, Red Hat even split once more. At best, I was worth $5 million from the options.

Red Hat started relatively low and inched skyward as Wall Street, in the throes of its love affair with anything even remotely related to the Internet, "discovered" Linux. We were the Flavor of the Month during the cold-weather months at the end of 1999. Investment pundits on television and in the general press couldn't get enough of this crazy little operating system that was promising to upend Microsoft. My phone rang constantly. It all reached a stunning climax with the VA Linux IPO on December 9th. That was an endorsement beyond anyone's expectation.

Larry Augustin and I went up to San Francisco to be on site at the offices of First Boston Credit Suisse for the IPO. I was wearing what I always wear: a freebie T-shirt and sandals. We brought our wives and kids. It was a crazy scene with the toddlers running around among the buttoned-down investment bankers.

It all happened so suddenly. Figures streamed across monitors indicating that VA Linux, on the first day of trading, was selling in the $300-a-share range. This was unheard of. Even if we hadn't seen the figures, we would have known it was a record because of the way the investment bankers were hypnotized by CNN and the Bloomberg financial channel. For his part, Larry was his usual cool self. I don't think he batted an eyelash during the whole thing. I wouldn't know for sure, because I was busy chasing after my daughters.

Even the dwellers of Madagascar's rainforests probably were aware of how rich it all made Larry. He had driven up to San Francisco without much of a financial net worth, and drove back to Silicon Valley worth something on the order of $1.6 billion. And, as the press continually pointed out, he was still in his twenties.

For my part, I had been given a stock grant and options for shares in VA Linux. As with Red Hat, I couldn't sell shares for six months. But unlike Red Hat, which climbed steadily, VA Linux had nowhere to go but down. After its record-setting opening day, the stock dropped steadily for a year, reaching a low point of 6.62. Partly, the stock was a victim of the market correction that hurt most technology stocks that April. But also, Linux's stint as Flavor of the Month had ended with the spring thaw. Because of the VA Linux lockup period, I couldn't take advantage of the hyper market while it lasted. It was psychologically much harder to follow the company than it had been to follow Red Hat, to know that every night when I crawled into bed, I would wake up with a lessened financial net worth.

But I still felt like the luckiest bastard alive.

Linus drives up to my Sausalito office one evening in January. After snickering about my use of a Macintosh and a non-Linux operating system, he sits down to read the first draft of a lengthy preface I have written, which is in the first person, from his perspective. I sit maybe two inches away. The only noise Linus makes is when he trips over a line about how he never expected to find himself the only global superstar Finland has produced other than Jean Sibelius and Nikki the Reindeer. After maybe ten minutes, he finishes the preface and his only comment is: "Boy, you write long sentences." we spend a couple of hours making the sentences shorter and changing some of the language to words that he would actually use, and learning how to collaborate at work, having already proven that we are champs at goofing off collaboratively. We eventually ditched that preface.

Then Linus attempts, unsuccessfully, to improve the resolution on my flat screen. It was last year's state-of-the-art computer screen, and I thought of it as something of a status symbol. "How can you read from this thing?" he asks. He is unsuccessful at improving the resolution quality to meet his standards. Then he takes out a piece of paper and starts drawing diagrams and explaining how monitors work. At some point I say, "Hey, let's grab some sushi."

"This money thing is driving me crazy," he says. "Just the waiting for the lock-up period to end. It's like having lots of money but not having lots of money. It's on my mind constantly."

I order saki. He orders fruit juice because he is driving.

"Up until now, we almost never had more than $5,000 in our checking account. Except for some stocks and stuff we have for savings that we can't touch, that was all the money we had to spend. So now I have all this money on paper and--"

"Like how much money? A couple of million?"

"How about $20 million? That's what the stock from the VA Linux IPO is worth, as long as it doesn't drop. But I don't have access to the money until the lock-up period in six months. No, now it's five months."

"I don't see the problem here. You have to wait five months before buying a big house? I don't mean to be unsympathetic but..."

"Hey, well it seems at first that it's enough money that we should be able to buy any house we want. But we need a house with five bedrooms and we want enough land around the house so we can hear animals and I've been playing pool everyday at work so we'll need a room that's big enough to hold a pool table. And we want a separate unit for when Tove's parents visit, or so we can have my sister's friends come from Finland and stay a few months and help us with the kids. It's funny, we had Patricia when we moved from Finland to the states. We had Daniela when we moved from our apartment to the duplex, and..."

"So you guys are working on having another kid?"

"Well, we're letting things happen naturally."

"Where I come from, you pronounce that, 'We're trying to have another kid,' dude."

"Okay. So we'll need more space and we've gone to a couple of Open Houses and the houses available are unbelievably expensive. I mean you get $20 million and it's like, wow, I can afford any house in the world. But we looked at a house for $1.2 million in Woodside that had no land and was really trashy. The best house we saw was for $5 million. But if you have $20 million, you've gotta figure that half of that goes to taxes.

Then you have $10 million to work with, but the taxes on a house like that could be like $60,000 a year, so you've got to set money aside for that. And I don't know. This is going to be the only time in my life when I'll get so much money and I don't want to overextend myself and not be able to afford to live in the house. And we don't want to have a mortgage hanging over our heads."

"I'm not feeling sorry for you. First of all, you'll probably do okay if Transmeta does okay in an IPO. "

"Yeah. But I'm only a junior engineer, so I'm not getting that much stock. And my salary isn't that high. "

"Linus, you could go to any venture capitalist in this town and get anything you wanted..."

"I guess you're right."

VIII.

This is the place where I slip in my golden rules. Number One is: "Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you." If you follow that rule, you'll always know how to behave in any situation. Number Two is: "Be proud of what you do." Number Three: "And have fun doing it."

Of course, it's not always easy to be proud and have fun. A month before the VA Linux IPO, I accomplished neither when I delivered a keynote speech at the 1999 Comdex Show in Las Vegas. Comdex, as most everyone knows, is the biggest, baddest trade show known to humanity. For most of a week, the sleepy town of Las Vegas, Nevada, becomes a magnet for every conceivable high-tech product that could possibly be peddled and the masses of people who would buy and sell them. It's the only time of the year when you can roll down the window of a Las Vegas cab, lean out, and ask a random hooker strutting past: "What time is the keynote?" -- and she'll know the answer.

It was a big deal that the trade show organizers asked the benevolent dictator of Planet Linux to give a Comdex keynote speech. It was the computer industry's way of acknowledging that Linux was a force with which to be reckoned.

Bill Gates delivered the keynote on Sunday, the first night of the show. He had attracted a standing-room crowd in the Venetian Hotel ballroom, which is about the size of seven average IKEA stores. Conference-goers who were eager to hear what he had to say about the antitrust trial -- which was happening at the time -- or who just wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren they had seen the world's richest man in the flesh, lined up hours beforehand in a snake pattern in the Hotel conference center's massive basement level. Gates's speech began with a lawyer joke, then included well-choreographed demonstrations of Microsoft Web technology and highly polished video segments, one of them with Gates dressed like and imitating Austin Powers -- that sent the audience into fits of laughter.

I wasn't there. I was helping Tove shop for a bathing suit.

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 Corndex-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 hangout 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 starlet's 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, it's 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 the 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 calender." 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 riffraff 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 Torlvaldian 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,^{3} 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 it's 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 l 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 per-user 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 far 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.

Then, of course, there was the incident in North Carolina. Guds! That was bad. A recently published book about Red Hat made it sound like an international incident of potentially catastrophic proportions. It wasn't really much.

I had been invited to speak at a meeting of Linux users hosted by Red Hat, which is based in Durham. The auditorium was packed. The moment I walked out onto the stage, everybody rose to their feet and started cheering. The first words out of my mouth were the first thing that came to mind:

"I am your God."

It was meant to be a joke, for crying out loud!

It wasn't, "I really am convinced that I am your God and you should never forget it." It was: "Okay, okay, okay. I know I'm your God. Now please just sit down and hold your appreciation until after you actually hear what I have to say, although I genuinely do appreciate your preemptive appreciation."

I can't believe I'm willingly reliving this.

After my four-word greeting, everyone was silent for a moment. Hours later, those four words had become the topic of newsgroup postings. I admit it: It was tasteless, but unintentionally tasteless. Actually, it was probably my way of dealing with the embarrassment of having people stand up and applaud you just because you step out to the speaker's podium.

People take me too seriously. They take a lot of things too seriously. And one lesson I've learned from my years as Linux's hood ornament is that there's something worse: Some folks can't be content to just take things too seriously on their own. They're not happy unless they convince others to go along with their obsession. This has become one of my major pet peeves in life.

Have you ever stopped to think why dogs love humans so much? No, it's not because their owners take them to the groomers every six weeks and occasionally pick up what they leave behind on the sidewalk. It's because dogs love getting told what to do. It gives them a reason to live. (This is particularly important since so many of them are out of work -- spayed or neutered, which means they've been laid off from their job as reproducers of new generations of canines. Also, with a few exceptions, there isn't much call for their wired-in jobs, like sniffing out rodents.) As a human, you're the leader of the pack and you're telling the dogs how they should behave. Following your orders is their passion. And they like it.

Unfortunately, that's how humans are built, too. People want to have somebody tell them what to do. It's in our kernel. Any social animal has to be that way.

It doesn't mean you're subservient. It just means that you are likely to go along with others when they tell you what to do.

Then there are people with individual ideas, folks who have convictions in certain areas to the degree that they say, "No, I won't go along." And these people become leaders. It's easy to become a leader. (It has to be. I became one, right?) Then, other people who don't have convictions in those areas are more than happy to let these leaders make their decisions for them and tell them what to do.

It's absolutely the right of any human being to do what they're told by someone they choose as a leader. I'm not arguing against that, although I find that part depressing. However, what I find to be unacceptable is when people, either leaders or followers, then try to impose their own world views on others. That's not just depressing -- it's scary. It's depressing that people will follow just about anyone, including me. And it's scary that people will then want to impose their followingness -- if that's a word -- on others, including me.

Forget the clean-cut robot/proselytizers who always seem to bang on your door whenever you're on the computer, concentrating on a tricky technical problem, or whenever the kids are finally napping and you're just starting to get amorous. A more relevant example is close at hand in the open source community: the zealots who believe that every innovation should be licensed under the GPL ("GPL'd" in hacker parlance.) Richard Stallman wants to make everything open source. To him, it's a political struggle, and he wants to use the GPL as a way to drive open source. He sees no other alternative. The truth is, I didn't open source Linux for such lofty reasons. I wanted feedback. And it's how things were done in the early days of computers, when most of the work was done at universities or defense establishments and they ended up being very open. You gave your source away to another university when people asked for it. What Richard did, after getting cut off from projects he loved, was to he the first person to consciously open source.

Yes, there are enormous benefits to be gained by opening up one's technology and making it available under the same terms as Linux and a host of other innovations. To get a glimpse of those benefits, all you have to do is just look at the comparatively low standards of quality of any closed software project. The GPL and open source model allows for the creation of the best technology. It's that simple. It also prevents the hoarding of technology and ensures that anyone with an interest in a project or technology won't be excluded from its development.

This is not a minor point. Stallman, who deserves a monument in his honor for giving birth to the GPL, was inspired to jump-start the free software phenomenon mainly because he was shut out of a succession of interesting development projects when they moved from the open, academic world of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the proprietary corporate environment. The most notable of these was the LISP machine. LISP started out as part of the artificial intelligence community. As with many things, somebody thought it was so good that they should form a startup to make it a commercial success and make money on it. This happens all the time at universities. But Richard wasn't part of the commercial crowd, so when LISP became a commercial project under a company named Symbolics in 1981, suddenly he was cut off. To add insult to injury, Symbolics hired away many of his cohorts from the AI lab.

The same thing happened to him a few other times. The way I understand it, his motivation for promoting open source was not so much anticommercial as it was antiexclusion. For him, open source is about not getting left out. It's about being able to continue working on a project regardless of who makes it commercial.

The GPL is wonderful in its gift of letting anyone play.Just think about what a major advance for humanity that is! But does that mean that every innovation should be GPL'd?

No way! This is the abortion issue of technology. It should be up to the individual innovator to decide for herself or himself whether to GPL the project or to use a more conventional approach to copyright. The thing that drives me crazy about Richard is that he sees everything in black and white. And that creates unnecessary political divisions. He never understands the viewpoint of anybody else. If he were into religion, you would call him a religious fanatic.

In fact, the most annoying thing -- second only to religious enthusiasts knocking on my door saying what I should believe in -- is people knocking on my door (or bombarding me with email) saying how I should license my software. This should not be a political issue. People should be able to make up their own minds. It's one thing to suggest to someone that they consider GPLing their software, and then leaving it at that. It's another thing to argue the point. It's really bad when people complain about the fact that I work for a commercial company that doesn't GPL everything it does. I tell them it's not their business.

The thing I find hugely irritating about Richard is not that he believes that Linux -- because its kernel relied on applications from the gnu software project -- should more rightly be called "gnu/Linux." It is not that he openly resents me for being a poster boy for open source even though he was sharing code while I was still sleeping in a laundry basket. No, the reason I find him so pesty is that he continually complains about other people not using the GPL.

I admire Richard from afar for a bunch of reasons. And I guess I tend to respect people, like Richard, who have very strong moral opinions. But why can't they keep these opinions to themselves? The thing I dislike the most is when people tell me what I should or should not do. I absolutely despise people who think they have any say over my personal decisions. (Except, perhaps, my wife.)

Over the course of the development of Linux, pundits such as Eric Raymond have suggested that the operating system's success and the longevity of open source development have partly hinged on my pragmatic approach and my ability to keep from taking sides in disputes. While Eric is arguably the best articulator of the open-source phenomenon (and while I strongly, strongly disagree with his pro-gun sentiments), I believe he's a bit off the mark on his perception of me. It's not that I keep from taking sides. It's just that I so strongly resent anyone who tries to impose his or her morals on others. You can replace the word "morals" with "religion," "computing preferences," whatever.

Just as imposing morals is wrong, the next step -- institutionalizing morals -- is doubly wrong. I'm a big believer in individual choice, which means that I think I should make my own decisions when it comes to moral issues.

I want to decide for myself. I'm very much against unnecessary rules imposed by society. I'm a big believer that you should be able to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home as long as you don't hurt anybody else. Any law saying otherwise is a very, very broken law. And there are laws that say otherwise. I find some scary rules, especially some that are imposed on schools and children. Imagine even thinking of imposing rules about teaching evolution, and taking that into the wrong direction. That I find scary. This is social conscience rearing its ugly head in places it really has nothing at all to do with.

At the same time, my personal belief is that what is more important than me and my individual moral decisions is, not even the human race, but evolution. To that extent, I want my individual choices to take social issues into account. But that's probably built in. I think it is built into human biology -- evolution -- that we do take social things into account. Otherwise we'd have been gone long ago.

The only other thing worth ranting about: people who are too preachy. There's just no reason for folks to evangelize, and to be so self-righteous about it.

And I'm sounding just like one of them.

But it's an easy trap when people start taking you far too seriously.

XI.

Americans make a big fuss over March 17th (St. Patrick's Day), May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), and October 12th (Columbus Day), but hardly any attention is paid to December 6th, which as any Finn can tell you is Finnish Independence Day.

Most folks in Finland celebrate Finnish Independence Day the way they celebrate everything else, by partying to excess. They party-to-excess -- even by Finnish standards -- the night before and recover in front of the television set for almost the entire national holiday. The option, I guess, is to go out and trudge in the snow hung over.

What keeps everyone glued to their TV sets is a single event: the President's Ball. Finland doesn't have much in the way of high society so the President's Ball is pretty much it, the only truly big society event. It's televised nationally to keep people from driving with hangovers and to prove to ourselves that we can stage our own respectable version of the Academy Awards. No, a better metaphor: It's the Super Bowl of Finnish high society.

So throughout the day, from Utsjoki in the north to Hanko in the south, Finns munch on gravlax and aspirin as they watch a procession of invitees -- men in tailcoats and women in outrageous (for Scandinavia) evening attire -- shake hands with the president.

Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine was the year I got invited.

You automatically get invited if you're an ambassador to Finland or if you're part of the Finnish parliament. Maybe one hundred or two hundred random people are invited on various grounds. They may have won a medal in the Olympics or maybe they helped the president on his campaign. If you are the captain of the ice hockey team and you've just won the world championship, you get invited. If the operating system you created gains worldwide attention, you get an invitation. Spouses and companions come, too.

In fact, it was lucky that Tove and I could go at all. In August we had applied to the INS for permission to go to Finland and return. We weren't approved until early November. Two weeks later we received our invitation to the President's Ball.

Now imagine what it's like. Picture 2,000 Finns -- and not even the most important 2,000 Finns -- packed into the president's castle. It was a home that had been built for a Russian merchant. It really is just a large home, not exactly a one-family home but maybe a home for one family that has a lot of support -- cooks, maids, and the like. It's not a huge place.

So you arrive. Someone takes your coat and then you're just jammed in there. You don't know where to go. Bowls of punch proliferate. Obviously, they contain vodka. This wouldn't be Finland if they didn't. It basically takes awhile to find people to talk to. You end up speaking to journalists, because, frankly, they're the most interesting people there. (Maybe it was the punch that made them seem more interesting than a parliament member from, say, Lahti.)

I didn't expect it to be much fun, because I wouldn't know many people there. I was the only one from the open source crowd invited. I expected it to be like the army -- more enjoyable to talk about later. But it actually was fun. Tove wore a green gown that would have been stunning and attracted media attention even if we were at the Oscars, not the Finnish President's Ball. Because she looked so good, and because Finland hadn't won the world ice hockey championship that year, the press dubbed us King and Queen of the Ball.

Whatever.

"You enter this house not as a journalist but as a friend. we are allowing no journalists in this house."

I had never seen Tove so ebullient. She greeted me at the door of the new house on the day she and Linus received the key. It's one of those monster homes: the Media Room (which now houses Linus's pool table) probably doesn't share a zip code with the Super Bonus Room, where Patricia and Daniela sleep, although it could handle an entire preschool. From the front door there's a wide, long angled hallway leading way back to the family room. If they remove the fancy Italian tiles, it will be a great place for the girls to practice skateboarding some day. Linus's office on the first floor has a mirrored sliding-glass door. Five bathrooms. Maybe they've found more of them by now. It's all in a gated community far from the heart of Silicon Valley.

Nicke Torvalds is visiting. Father and son return from a trip to the old duplex in a rented BMW Z3. It's the model Linus will soon be purchasing, and Nicke will drive it to the Stanford University library this afternoon. But first, he leans against the hot tub, situated in the unlandscaped backyard, and announces that this is the largest house anyone named Torvalds has ever owned. Then he takes a piece of paper and lists all twenty Torvaldses. He didn't know that a twenty-first was on its way.

Linus, too, is thrilled in the empty house. Nicke videotapes the surroundings and I ask Linus to carry Tove across the threshold so I can photograph the event. There's some very un-Finnish public displaying of affection.

"Did you ever think our house would be this big?" Tove asks me.

• • •

Tove needed to be on hand at the opening of the Ikea store in Emeryville to buy armoires for the new house, so I suggested Linus bring the kids over to a house I was renting in Stinson Beach. As soon as they arrived, I urged Linus to try out the kayak in the lagoon. He paddled around by himself, then with each of the girls, and climbed back onto the dock with wet pants.

I wanted Linus to give me his thoughts on a chapter entitled, "Wjll Success Spoil Me?" and took the girls outside to the beach so he could read it undisturbed. Patricia and Daniela spent maybe a half hour hunting for starfish and tiptoeing into the water, after which one of them announced "Kisin kommer," which translates to: "I've got to potty."

We returned to the house to find Linus sitting at the computer, in his underwear, a bag of pretzels at his side, intently typing away. It took him maybe fifteen seconds to realize we had arrived: He looked up from the monitor. His first words were: "Boy, your Macintosh sucks. "

Then: "Oh, and I put my pants in your dryer."

He had retitled the chapter "Fame and Fortune," figuring that "Wjll Success Spoil Me?" sounded a bit egotistical. He wanted more time to write, so I took the girls out to search for seals while he finished the chapter.

XII.

It's easy to fight windmills if you don't realize how hard it is.

Five years ago when people asked me if I thought Linux would be able to take over the desktop and make a dent in Microsoft, they always had a doubtful edge to their voice. I invariably told them that I thought it would. They would look skeptical.The fact is, they probably knew more than I did about the reality.

I didn't really understand all the steps it would take to get there. Not only what it takes to tackle the technical problems of developing a robust and portable operating system, but what it takes to make that operating system a commercial, as well as technical, success. I would have been discouraged if I had known in advance just how much infrastructure would need to be in place to make Linux as successful as it has been. It's not only that you have to be good. You have to be good, sure, but everything has to turn out the right way, too.

Any sane person would have gazed up at the rugged mountainface that needed to be scaled, and would have been absolutely daunted. Just think about the technical problems of supporting PCs, which are about the most varied hardware out there. You have to support people who have bugs that you can't reproduce on applications that you don't even care about. But you care about Linux, so you care about helping to fix them.

Even to think about penetrating the commercial market, you have to have a respectable level of user support. From early on with Linux, you could have real support by doing it internally within a company. But to make it in a big way, you have to have a lot of people and a lot of infrastructure. It's not enough to have a 1900 number or a 1-800 number for the first thirty days. To some extent, support is no longer much of an issue because it can be bought at any number of places -- Linuxcare, Red Hat, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Compaq, Dell. But it clearly was something that had to be in place. For the longest time, I didn't even realize that. It has been a major challenge for years.

Unlike business people with solid technical backgrounds or journalists with a commercial bent, I was a narrowly focused software developer who was naive about what would be required. The technical problems alone would have kept me from embarking on this journey. If I had known how much work it would take, and that I would still be doing it ten years later -- and that it would be almost a full-time job those entire ten years -- I never would have started.

And the abuse! I don't get that much abuse these days, but it still happens. People who don't like open source or people who are just upset about bugs will send me email, cursing me over their frustrations. Compared to the amount of positive mail I get, it's minuscule. But it still happens.

Yes, if I had realized how much work and how hard, how difficult a lot of things would have been, I probably would not have done it. If I had had enough knowledge to understand the problems in advance, I probably never would have taken Linux far beyond its initial release. If I had known how much detail you have to get right, and how much people expect of an operating system, I would have been able to envision horror scenarios of things I couldn't handle.

But I also wasn't able to predict the upside. Like how much support I would get, and how many people would be working together on this. So now I change my mind. I guess if I had actually known the upside, I probably would have done it.