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Linus Torvalds, the Swedish-speaking child of Finland, son of an austere and demanding communist journalist and a gentle and indulgent humanist mother, spent most of his teenage years locked in his bedroom with the curtains down. It wasn't, however, drugs or even a surreptitiously purchased copy of Playboy that informed his idle hour -- it was computers. Finally, like a swami emerging from his cave of penance having acquired miraculous powers through austerities, Linus burst forth bearing Linux, and the world will never be the same.
"A great mathematician doesn't solve a problem the long and boring way because he sees what the real pattern is behind the question and applies that pattern to find the answer in a much better way."
Just for Fun, by Torvalds and David Diamond, recounts the story of Linus's life and intellectual development leading to the creation of the world's most successful piece of free software, the Linux kernel. While this is essentially and thoroughly a human interest story suitable for all adult readers, we are not spared the computer technical details, to the delight of the cognoscenti. As the section titled, "Birth of an Operating System" footnotes:
"*Warning: Intermediate geek language until page 119."
We follow Linus all the way from infancy, sleeping in a laundry basket in icy Finland, to his half-million dollar home in California (every European's secret dream) and his custom BMW sports car. Along the way, this dreamy nerd manages to marry the female karate champion of Finland and learn to boogie board and play tennis, in between attending receptions in his honor by diplomats and world leaders, all the while transforming the face of personal computing forever. You are forced to conclude in the balance that it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Occasionally inadvertently, often intentionally and mischievously, the telling of the tale conjures up the image of Dilbert in conversation with technical writer Tina, ("There I was in my Mom's fallopian tube ..."). Still, Just for Fun manages at all times to remain hugely entertaining, simply because Linus is such a fun guy and has matured at 30 (with some aid from Diamond) into an artful raconteur.
"Some people remember time according to the cars they drove or the jobs they held or the places they lived or the sweethearts they dated. My years are marked by computers."
Linus has breezed informally through computer science as he has breezed informally, often naked in a sauna, through life. When Linus was cranking out Linux, some of us already had kids his age and had been working in the industry for a while. Linus's takes on various aspects of programming are often superficial:
"Forth was a strange language that nobody uses anymore. It was kind of a fun, niche market language that was fairly widely used in the 1980's for different things, but it never became very popular, being difficult to follow for non-techie people. Actually, it was kind of useless."
His observations are nonetheless redeemed by the reader's awareness of being kidded -- kidded in a very serious and earnest fashion by this very serious and earnest young man who doesn't take himself or his achievements very seriously at all, certainly not nearly as serious as his fans take him.
"Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That's when you get the best results. My approach made headlines."
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared that the secret to his success was that "At an early age, I discovered I was not God." This may be one cardinal difference between Linus and Richard M. Stallman, Linus's free software godfather. As Linus writes,
"I admire Richard from afar for a bunch of reasons. I guess I tend to respect people, like Richard, who have very strong moral opinions. But why can't they keep these opinions to themselves?"
Richard Stallman, that brooding, bitter genius whose depth as a programmer, computer scientist, economist, and social engineer will not be matched by Linus Torvalds in this millennium, has been known to impetuously brand his ideological opponents of the moment as "Satan." Linus, on the other hand, married and father of three at last count, remains a sweet guy who would blush before he would let such an epithet escape out of his mouth. Ergo, it's a lot more pleasant to read what Linus has to say than what Stallman has to say. Stallman never writes "just for fun," but Linus claims, with justification, to live his life that way:
"So what this builds up to is that in the end we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride."
20 centuries ago two rabbis, Raba and Abaye, were locked in ideological dispute. Raba was tolerant and practical, while Abaye, though thunderously brilliant, was harsh and demanding. Students of that generation came to the conclusion, "Why gnaw bones with Abaye when we can chew the fat with Raba?" with the result that Judaism to this day follows the teaching of Raba.
There's a lesson there somewhere, but I forget it, or never learned it properly. Who cares? Read the book. It's just for fun.
-- Jack J. Woehr (http://www.softwoehr.com)