Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (24 page)

What? And it starts to sink in: He’s not getting back to you. He’s had enough, He’s a celebrity and getting a quick interview with him now will be like getting a quick interview with that
other
big computer industry celebrity, The woman rattles off a fax number and you’re already thinking of hitting the old
0-#
combo for a receptionist
…

“
Our receptionists do not take messages for him, nor do they keep his calendar.”
D’oh.
She’s pleasant. The worst. “But they will gladly get your fax to him.” Uh-huh. And Bill will gladly break up Microsoft to appease David Boies.

Okay, so the Linux revolution isn’t over, but like any revolution, the rag-tag riff-raff is being superseded by mainstream sympathizers. Suburban new wave supplanted urban punk rock. Wealthy landowners in the colonies rose up after the poor taxed man
.
(The wealthy landowners, by the way, later tried to foist on frontiersmen a whiskey tax not so different from the tea tax imposed on them a few years earlier.)

Torvalds, by this point, was clearly entering the canned realm of sports figures with his answers. Think Tim Robbins in
Bull Durham: “
I just need to go out there and give 110 percent to try and help the team…”

Okay, I guess I owe Mr. Berinato an explanation, but not an apology.

Anyone reading this column would assume the mounting pressures of my role as chief nerd had turned me into an asshole. But that’s wrong. I always was an asshole.

I’ll start at the beginning. I think voice mail is evil. It is the perfect example of a bad technology. In fact it is the worst technology that exists, and I hate it with a passion. So at Transmeta we started out with a per-user voice mail system that allowed each employee to store twenty minutes worth of messages. After that, callers got the message saying the mailbox was full, please contact the receptionist. Mine was always full.

I think it was the journalists who caused the backlash. They would badger the Transmeta receptionists because my voice mailbox was full. After the first hundred times, the receptionists started getting irritated. They knew I wasn’t interested and they didn’t want to be the ones telling people to fuck off.

So I started deleting messages without listening to them, just so the front desk people wouldn’t get annoyed. Most of the time I would never listen to my messages, anyway. For one thing, people usually mumble their phone numbers into the recording, and I would have to listen fifteen times just to figure out what they’ve said. Also, I refuse to call people back if I have no reason to call them back. People would get a warm and fuzzy feeling that they had left a message. Until they realized I wouldn’t return their call.

That’s when they would call the receptionist. The receptionist wouldn’t know what to say, so I would tell him or her to tell the caller to fax me. Faxes are as easy to ignore as voice mail, although at least with a fax you could make out the number, should you want to. I never wanted to.

At first, the receptionist politely told callers to please send me a fax. Eventually, people caught on to the fact that I didn’t read the fax, and they would call back a week later and complain that they had already faxed me. So the receptionist again got caught in the middle. It wasn’t her job to handle my calls.

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.

X

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 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.

Forget the clean-cut robot/proselytizers who always seem to bang on your door whenever you’re on the computer, concentrating on a tricky technical problem, or whenever the kids are finally napping and you’re just starting to get amorous. A more relevant example is close at hand in the open source community: the zealots who believe that every innovation should be licensed under the GPL (“GPL’d” in hacker parlance.) Richard Stallman wants to make everything open source. To him, it’s a political struggle, and he wants to use the GPL as a way to drive open source. He sees no other alternative. The truth is, I didn’t open source Linux for such lofty reasons. I wanted feedback. And it’s how things were done in the early days of computers, when most of the work was done at universities or defense establishments and they ended up being very open. You gave your source away to another university when people asked for it. What Richard did, after getting cut off from projects he loved, was to be the first person to consciously open source.

Yes, there are enormous benefits to be gained by opening up one’s technology and making it available under the same terms as Linux and a host of other innovations. To get a glimpse of those benefits, all you have to do is just look at the comparatively low standards of quality of any closed software project. The GPL and open source model allows for the creation of the best technology. It’s that simple. It also prevents the hoarding of technology and ensures that anyone with an interest in a project or technology won’t be excluded from its development.