Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

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.

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.