Linus Torvalds' double life

By Andy Walker

To look at Linus Torvalds, you'd never know he leads a double life.

In person he is a 29-year-old bookish programmer whose life got caught in the bright lights of the giga-traffic on the Information Superhighway.

On the Internet he is a player in the myriad of rumors and innuendoes stemming from his latest project at the top secret Transmeta Corporation in California's Silicon Valley suburb of Santa Clara.

When I found him, he was sitting on a sofa in the press lounge of the Association of Information and Image Management conference held in Atlanta. Earlier that day, he'd sat on a panel that debated his home-written operating system Linux.

He'd charmed the audience by sparring - at times maliciously -- with Jim Ewel, program manager for Microsoft's Windows 2000. That's the company's replacement for the Windows NT operating system.

Asked if he'd consider an interview, he shrugged: "Sure." He had an interview with CNN coming up, but he had an hour to kill. First, though, some lunch in the speaker's prep room.

His story is the stuff of dreams, for basement dwelling geeks. Like many success stories his life was broadsided by a series of events that caught him by surprise.

Torvalds' claim to fame is the latest challenger to Microsoft's dominance in the operating system business.

In the summer of 1991, Torvalds wrote his own operating system called Linux (Torvalds pronounces it: LYNN-ucks) while he was a graduate student at the University of Helsinki.

He posted the program to a server at the nearby Helsinki University of Technology and the computer community started to take notice.

He wrote it for fun, he claims. "I wanted to have a project - I wanted to do some programming because that is what I did. I wanted a Unix clone."

Linux is an offshoot of Unix, a 30-year-old server operating system originally developed by Bell Labs. It runs on many of the computers that run the Internet. To the home user, Unix is unfriendly and obscure. To academics and computer scientists, it is the pillar of their computing world.

In eight years, Linux has gone from a university graduate project to a viable operating system that is installed, by Torvalds' estimates, on 10 million computers. Though he admits other attempted counts put the number at anywhere from eight million to 25 million installations.

Torvalds may have been the originator of the software, but it was built by a disparate global group of Linux devotees who donated their time and talents.

The Linux organization is made up of people "that have proven themselves. That people trust. It is a respect-ocracy," said Torvalds.

To call the group of Linux authors an organization is oxymoronic. "It's informal. It certainly has its rules. They are not written down," said Torvalds.

Development is done across the Internet and it is rare to see Linuxians in a room together.

"For Linux, it has always worked like that. So everybody's used to development on the Net," said Torvalds. "When you get together you discuss computers but it tends to be more like brainstorming and like getting drunk and having fun."

Torvalds, who counts his father, grandfather and Einstein, among his heroes, is the technical lead on Linux.

"I do some development usually in key areas where I want to make sure that the basics of the kernel" -- the heart of an operating system -- "is under my very strict control," he said. "But most of the kernel is developed by others and I have key people who have their own areas they are specializing in like device drivers but also networking and things like that."

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