Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

You don't believe me?

Look at how we classify animals as "lower" or "higher" order animals. They all survive. But the higher you get in the evolutionary scale, the more you are likely to first create social patterns -- even ants, fairly low down on the scale, have very strict social patterns -- that eventually progress into having fun. Playing with your food is not something ants tend to do a lot. ... But cats do. Ants don't enjoy sex, either.

Yes, take something as basic (and delightful) as sex. I don't claim that it is one of the fundamental motivational factors per se -- but it's a great example of rather fundamental human behavior that has undergone the whole evolution of life. There's no question that it started out as a pure survival trait. After all, even plants have "sex" in the survival sense, and at some stage billions of years ago, sex was probably purely a survival thing for those single-celled animals that would slowly evolve into geeks and other humans. And there's no question that sex long ago evolved from a purely survival phenomenon into a very social phenomenon. It's not only among humans that you find marriage ceremonies and a lot of social infrastructure for getting laid. Think of the ritual dance of the Sandhill crane -- which mates for life, by the way. In fact, inordinate amounts of energy get spent every day on the social courtship rituals associated with the simple matter of reproduction of all the species.

Entertainment? That too, I assure you. Not just among humans, but it is probably no coincidence that the most evolved species on the planet also seems to make the most out of the entertainment aspect of sex.

The progression of survival to social behavior to entertainment is everywhere. Take war: very much a survival trait back when the only way to get to the watering hole was to kill the people in your way who wanted that source of water for themselves. War has long since become a tool for maintaining social order in society. And with the advent of CNN, it has become entertainment. Like it or not, this seems to be the inevitable progression.

Civilization itself follows the same larger pattern. Originally it was a way to ensure survival by cooperation and power in numbers. That is nothing unique to humans. Most animals and even plant life create societies in order to survive better by helping each other. And what is so interesting is how society itself moves from being survival-based toward being more social; how all human civilizations end up building bigger and better roads and communication channels in order to be able to better socialize.

And in the end civilization too becomes geared toward entertainment. Look at the Roman Empire -- famous not only for its road building and strong social order, but also, especially later, even more famous for its entertainment.

Or look at the United States today. Does anybody doubt that the film and computer-game industries are not about ushering in the entertainment society? From having been niche markets not that long ago, they are now among the biggest industries in the richest country in the world.

And what is interesting to me as a technologist is how this pattern repeats itself in the technology we create. We call the early age of modern technology the Industrial Age, but what it really should be called is the Age of Technological Survival. Technology, up until not that long ago, was almost exclusively for surviving better -- being able to weave cloth better and to move goods around faster. That was some of the original impetus for it all.

We call the current period the Information Age. It's a big shift. It's about technology being used for communication and spreading information -- a very social behavior -- rather than just surviving in better style. The Internet, and the fact that so much of our technology is starting to move toward it, is a big road-sign of our times: It means that people in the industrialized countries are starting to take the survival thing for granted, and suddenly the next phase of technology becomes the big and exciting one: the social aspect of communication technology, of using technology not just to live better but as an integral part of social life.

The ultimate goal, of course, is still looming. Past the information society, the entertainment society. A place where the Internet and wireless communications twenty-four hours a day is taken for granted and doesn't get any headlines anymore. A time when Cisco is the old market, and Disney Corporation owns the world. A time probably not too far in the future.

So what does this all mean? Probably not much. After all, my theory of the meaning of life doesn't actually guide you in what you should be doing. At most, it says "Yes, you can fight it, but in the end the ultimate goal of life is to have fun."

It does, to some degree, explain why people are willing and eager to work on projects like Linux on the Internet. For me, and for many other people, Linux has been a way to scratch two motivational itches at the same time. Taking survival for granted, Linux has instead brought people both the entertainment of an intellectual challenge and the social motivations associated with being part of creating it all. We may not have seen each other face-to-face very much, but email was much more than just a dry exchange of information. Bonds of friendship and other social ties can form over email.

This probably also means that if and when we ever meet another intelligent life form in this universe, their first words are not likely to be "Take me to our leader." They're more likely to say "Party on, dude!"

Of course, I might be wrong.

Pages 251-262 of the book. No need to copy because the digital document is easily searchable.

Printed book says "(I hope I'm not losing any of the non-geeks who have steadfastly refused to leap ahead to page 120.)", changed because this document has no pages.

Printed book says "poposed", which is likely a typo: changed to "proposed".

Printed book says "There are good bad ones and really bad ones.", added comma in the listing.

Printed book says "And what does this all means?", deleted "s" in "menas" to correct grammar mistake.

Boy, that has to bean acquired taste. I'm guessing it started out with Puritans who couldn't drink beer because it has alcohol. So they concocted a beverage that didn't have alcohol in it and happened to be made with roots, and they called it "root beer" to fool people into thinking it was good stuff. And after ten generations of people being fooled into thinking it was good stuff, people bought into it. Today, Americans like root beer because they have ten generations of genetic engineering behind them.

This, as anybody who lives in San Jose can tell you, is called IRONY: San Jose doesn't have nightlife. People living here drive to San Mateo if they actually want to have fun.

Actually, Einstein did work for the patent office when he did his work on special relativity. But he was special. Even most patent clerks admit that.

There's nothing wrong with a Pontiac Grand Am, and it's a fine car. It's also probably the most "average Joe" car in the whole United States, and some journalists have found it interesting that I would have such an embarrassingly regular car. It's not even Japanese, for chrissake! People will lose all respect for me when I admit that I spent hours agonizing over the exact color of my new car -- a much less practical BMW Z3. Remember -- "Just for Fun." That car is completely and utterly useless for anything but fun. And that's just the way I like it.