Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read Online Free PDF

Linux show in San Jose, which prompted the editor to lure me into the assignment with the words, “We’ve got a global superstar right here in, uh, Santa Clara.” He faxed over some newspaper reports.
    Linus had moved to Silicon Valley two years earlier and was working for the then-secretive Transmeta Corporation, which had for years been developing a microprocessor that promised to upend the computer industry. He somehow had a job that allowed him to maintain his time-consuming position as the ultimate leader of Linux and final authority on any changes made to the operating system. (His followers had, in fact, initiated the legal maneuvering that gave him legal ownership of the Linux trademark.) And he had time to trot the globe as poster boy for the burgeoning open source movement.
    But he had become something of a mysterious folk hero. While Bill Gates, everybody’s favorite nemesis, was living in splendor in his Xanadu, Linus resided with his wife and toddler daughters in a cramped Santa Clara duplex. He apparently was unconcerned about the fabulous wealth that was being rained upon the flocks of less-talented programmers. And his very presence raised an unutterable conundrum among the stock-option-driven minions in Silicon Valley: How could anyone so brilliant possibly be so uninterested in getting rich?
    Linus has no handlers, doesn’t listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email. It took weeks for me to get him on the phone, but once I did he easily agreed to an interview at his earliest convenience, which was about a month later: May 1999. Having developed a professional passion for putting interview subjects into compromising positions, I decided that a Finnish sauna might be the perfect backdrop for the profile. In a rented Mustang convertible, with a photographer at the wheel, we headed over to Santa Cruz and what was recommended as the Bay Area’s best sauna, which was on the grounds of a New Age/nudist retreat.
    He was armed with an opened can of Coke as he emerged from the innards of Transmeta’s offices in an anonymous Santa Clara office park. He wore the programmer’s uniform of jeans, conference T-shirt, and the inevitable socks-and-sandals combo that he claimed to have favored even before ever meeting another programmer. “It must be some programmer’s law of nature,” he reasoned when I asked about the footware choice.
    The first question to Linus, as we sat in the backseat, was a throwaway. “Are your folks in technology?” I asked while fiddling with my tape recorder.
    “ No, they’re all basically journalists,” he replied, adding: “So I know what scum you are.”
    He didn’t think he could get away with that.
    “ Oh. You come from scum?” I responded.
    The world’s best programmer laughed so hard that he coughed out a spray of Coke onto the back of the photographer-driver’s neck. He turned red. This would be the start of a memorable afternoon.
    It only got more bizarre. Finns are fanatical about their saunas and this was to be his first visit to one in nearly three years. The pale, naked superstar with steamed-up glasses sat on the highest perch, with his wet tan hair matted down on his face and a river of sweat flowing down what I would later, purely out of good will, describe as his “incipient paunch.” He was surrounded by tanned, self-obsessed Santa Cruzans and their monotonous New Age rantings, and he seemed above it all, eagerly pointing out the authentic features of the sauna. He had this beatific grin on his face.
    It’s my conviction that, for the most part, people in Silicon Valley are happier than everybody else. For one thing, they’re at the control panel of the economic revolution. More importantly, they’re all getting insufferably rich, both New Valley and Old Valley. But one never sees people smile there, at least not outside the confines of their brokers’ offices.
    Most acclaimed technologists—even most of the unacclaimed ones—have this