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Authors: Linus Benedict Torvalds

Tags: #Autobiography and memoir

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BOOK: Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
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“
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 its like, wow, I can afford any house in the world. But we looked at a house for
$7.2
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
$70
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 Comdex-inspired traffic jam on the Strip so we arrived at the Venetian Hotel only a half-hour before I was due to begin. I was with Tove and the girls and some folks from the show. When we finally got into the building, we had problems getting access to the backstage area because one of the organizers had misplaced the security badges. I mean, everything went wrong.
So finally we got inside. I would have been nervous if I were about to speak before forty people, let alone the biggest audience of my life. Then it happened.
I discovered that the computer itself, which had been so painstakingly set up two days earlier, was nowhere to be found. It was insane. Someone mentioned that people had started lining up for the speech downstairs more than four hours in advance, and that the waiting area was packed to capacity. Meanwhile, we were running around like hens without heads, searching backstage for the machine.
It was a normal desktop system with Star Office, one of the Linux office suites, installed. And I was supposed to just put in my floppy and go. Everything had been set up so that there wouldn’t even be any cables to attach.
But the computer had vanished.
Apparently the machine had somehow gotten mislabeled or something, so it was shipped back. Happily, I had my laptop with me and I had the actual slide file of my speech on the laptop and I did have Star Office installed.
Because this was my laptop, I didn’t have all the right fonts. That meant that the last line on all my slides was missing. When I realized this, I thought:
Who cares? I’m going to get through this alive.
Then we had to hook up all the cables. I mean, literally, they started letting people in before everything was set up. I was up there, still trying to get it to work, as a flood of humanity washed into the humongous auditorium, filling every available seat and then filling the standing area along the sides. Luckily, they gave me the standing-ovation
before
I opened my mouth.
I started out with some lame reference to the lawyer joke that Bill Gates used to open his speech. I gave a one-sentence hint about what then-secretive Transmeta was developing. It had been wildly rumored in the press that I would use the Comdex speech as an occasion to (finally) announce Transmeta’s chip. But we were just not ready. The main part of my speech simply involved ticking off the benefits of open source computing. I wasn’t in a mood to crack as many jokes as I ordinarily do. At one point, Daniela—who was sitting with Tove and Patricia in the first row—began a crying spell that was probably audible throughout Las Vegas’s casinos and strip clubs.
That was not a speech that will go down in history among the great orations. Later, someone tried to cheer me up by informing me that Bill Gates, too, had been visibly nervous on the same stage the night before. However, his onstage apparatus had worked without a hitch. The trouble was, he had the U.S. Department of Justice breathing down his neck. I guess I came out ahead.
It seemed like a strategy out of Journalism 101: Find the person who had been waiting the longest to hear Linus’s keynote, and hang out with him (undoubtedly, him) in line. What better way to gather insight into the dweebie hordes who follow Linus like he’s some sort of vendorware-clad God.
At 5 P.M. I’m on an escalator descending into Geek Woodstock.
At the head of the vast, snaking line is an intense computer science student from Walla Walla College who eagerly agrees to let me join him. He has been waiting, so far, two and a half hours to see Linus, and he will be waiting another two and a half hours before being let into the auditorium. His classmates, who are behind him in line, arrived in the queue maybe half an hour after he did. They drove down from Washington State with one of their professors and are sleeping in the gymnasium of a local high school. They all seem to have started their own Web design business. They seem to have conveniently divided up the universe of grownups into two groups—hackers and suits—and are constantly pointing out members of the latter category in the growing line, saying things like, “Man, look at all the suits here,” the way their Delta Tau Chi counterparts might survey a beach during spring break and observe, “Man, look at all the foxes here.” But like their Delta Tau Chi counterparts, they are doing all the usual horseplay—slapping each other high-fives, trading insults, although the insults all relate to motherboards or gigabytes.
And then they talk about Linus. His name comes across capitalized, as in “LINUS wouldn’t work at a company that wasn’t going to be open source, He just wouldn’t.” They have been slavish scrutinizers of slashdot and other Web sites where rumors of Transmeta’s hushed goings-on circulate like the lurid details of a Hollywood starlets love life. This mania and the speculation/fascination isn’t happening only among the ardent groupies who arrived here first.
I visit the men’s room and take my place at the only empty urinal, interrupting a conversation in progress.
“
This speech is going to be way boring compared to the Gates keynote,” says the fellow to my left.
“
What do you expect?” replies the other guy. “Linus is a hacker, not a suit. I mean, give him a break.”
When we finally get into the auditorium, somehow we are not up front but toward the back of the middle. My line-mate from Walla Walla forgets, for a moment, about the excitement of seeing his hero live, and goes into a rage about not being in the first row, where he deserves to be. Soon, he is pointing out the suits in the audience. Even though we’re maybe seventy-five yards from the front, its possible to catch a glimpse of Linus on the darkened stage, seated at a computer. He quickly types into the computer while being surrounded by a few officials. What could be happening up there? Some sort of last-minute software demonstration?
Eventually, Linus and the others leave the stage. Somehow Linus International Executive Director Maddog (Jon Hall) is introduced. My companion from Walla Walla gets visibly excited. “Check out the beard,” he says. Then, Maddog announces how pleased he is to introduce a man who is like a son to him. Linus reemerges and gets a big hairy hug from Maddog. Even from back in the cheap seats, I could tell he was nervous.
“
I wanted to start with a lawyer joke, but that was taken,” he says, a reference to antitrust-suit-plagued Bill Gates’s well-received opening the previous night: “Anybody heard any good lawyer jokes?”
He proceeds to give a one-sentence hint at Transmeta’s secretive operation. Then the rest of his speech consists of rattling off the sentences that are flashed on slides high above his head, statements about the growing importance of open source. Nothing surprising. Nothing new.
It is delivered in a tired-but-cheerful monotone. At one point, one of his daughters cries.
In mid-sentence he says, “That’s my kid.” You could look up at the monitor and see the stage lighting reflecting off the beads of sweat on his forehead.
Afterward, audience members line up for questions, He quickly declines to say which of the Linux word processing software he prefers, When someone asks him how many stuffed penguins he has at home, he answers: “Quite a few.” An audience member asks how he likes living in California, to which he responds by rhapsodizing about the weather, “It’s November and I’m still wearing shorts, In Helsinki I’d have lost my crown jewels by now.” A fan walks up to the microphone for audience questions and announces, simply, “Linus, you’re my hero.” To which Linus responds, as if he has heard the same statement a million times and answered it a million times: “Thanks,”
After 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…”
BOOK: Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
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