"Entertaining ...
Insights into how the mind
of a creative developer works."
-Newsweek
LINUS
TORVALDS
Creator of
LINUX
and DAVID DIAMOND
Just for
FUN
or
THE S T O R Y O F AN A C C I D E NT A L R E V O L U T I O NA R Y
LINUS TORVALDS,
CREATOR OF LINUX,
AND
DAVID DIAMOND
HARPER
"ls the Linux Revolution
Over"
beginning on page 186 is reprinted from ZD Net,
August 26, 1999, with permission. Copyright © 1999, ZD Net Inc. All rights
reserved.
JUST FOR FUN.
Copyright© 2001 by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond.
Al{ rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For
information address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., JO East 53rd Street, New
York, NY J0022.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promo
tional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, Harper
Collins Publishers Inc., JO East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First HarperBusiness paperback edition published 2002
Designed by Fritz Metsch
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Torvalds, Linus, 1969-
just for fun : the story of an accidental revolutionary
I
Linus Torvalds and
David Diamond.
p.
cm.
ISBN 0-06-662072-4 (he)
1. Torvalds, Linus, 1969-
2. Computer programmers-Finland-Biography.
3. Linux. I. Diamond, David. II. Title.
QA76.2.T67 T67 2001
005.1'092-dc21
(BJ
ISBN 0-06-662073-2 (pbk.)
12 RRD 1211
00-054199
To Tove and Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste. I always wanted to be
surrounded by young women, and you made it so.
To Tia and Kaley. Boy do I feel blessed.
This wouldn't qualify as acknowledgments without the dropping of some
important names, so here goes:
We acknowledge our editor, Adrian Zackheim, who caved in to our every
demand; Erin Richnow, the HarperCollins assistant editor who was more
on top of this project than we were; our agents, Bill Gladstone of Water
side Productions and Kris Dahl of ICM, who couldn't have been speedier
in the forwarding of our checks to us; Sara Torvalds, who has the best
backup memory on the Fennoscandia peninsula-and operates in three
languages-and William and Ruth Diamond, who read the original
manuscript and kept repeating, "No, really, it's good. "
My heart was in my throat when he was growing up: How on Earth was
he going to meet any nice girls that way?
-Anna Torvalds
Introductio n:
Post-its from a Revo lutio n
During the euphoria of the final years of the twentieth century, a
revolution was happening among all the other revolutions. Seemingly
overnight, the Linux operating system caught the world's attention. It had
exploded from the small bedroom of its creator, Linus Torvalds, to attract
a cultish following of near-militant geeks. Suddenly it was infiltrating
the corporate powerhouses controlling the planet. From a party of one it
now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antarctica,
and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Not only was it the
most common operating system running server computers dishing out all the
content on the World Wide Web, but its very development model-an
intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer
computer programmers-had grown to become the largest collaborative
project in the history of the world. The open source philosophy behind it all
was simple: Information, in this case the source code or basic instructions
behind the operating system, should be free and freely shared for anyone
interested in improving upon it. But those improvements should also be
freely shared. The same concept had supported centuries of scientific discov
ery.
Now it was finding a home in the corporate sphere, and it was possi
ble to imagine its potential as a framework for creating the best of
anything: a legal strategy, an opera.
Some folks caught a glimpse of the future and didn't like what
they saw. Linus's round, bespectacled countenance became a favored dart
board target within Microsoft Corporation, which was now faced with its
first honest-to-goodness competitive threat. But, more often, people wanted
to learn more about the kid who-if he did not start it all-at least
i x
jump-started it and was, in effect, its leader. The trouble was, the more
successful Linux and open source became, the less he wanted to talk about
it. The accidental revolutionary started Linux because playing on a com
puter was fun (and also because the alternatives weren't that attractive).
So when someone tried to convince him to speak at a major event by telling
him that his millions of followers just wanted to at least
see
him, in the
flesh, Linus go�d-naturedly offered to participate in a dunk-tank instead.
That would be more fun, he explained. And a way of raising money.
They. declined. It wasn't their idea of how to run a revolution.
Revolutionaries aren't born. Revolutions can't be planned. Revolu
tions can't be managed.
Revolutions
happen . . . .
x
] 11 s t fo r F 11 n
-David Diamond
Dostları ilə paylaş: |