Digital Wanderer | Linus Torvalds’s Book

Linus Torvalds is a cult figure, the creator of the Linux operating system, which is marching triumphantly across the planet (at least in server rooms, if not on your computer). Actually, he has not earned his cult status, unlike Stallman, the saintly founder of GNU, but that is not the point.

And while computer geeks usually consider Gates a herald of Satan and a terrible evil, they exalt Torvalds as a benevolent angel. Naturally, both claims are nonsense, but that does not matter either.

What matters is that both men wrote books: William Gates III even wrote two: The Road Ahead and Business @@ the Speed of Thought.
I cannot say anything about them; I have not read them. But Linus’s book, "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary," is, in accordance with GPL principles, quite legally available online, so it would have been a shame not to learn more about such a major figure.
The story of how the Linux OS came into being is interspersed with episodes from Torvalds’s life and entertaining descriptions of everyday life in Finland. There is also plenty of humor and some rather feeble philosophy, which personally sends me to sleep.

The only unpleasant thing is that the authors defend the open-source ideology* with furious fanaticism, completely turning a blind eye to the inconsistencies and problems within that very ideology. In this respect, they are no different from the apologists for commercial software—just as dishonest and just as fond of presenting wishful thinking as reality.

Overall, the book is not bad; it is worth reading for IT people.

Quote:
To be honest, at the time I simply hated the army. But some things only have to end before they instantly turn into wonderful memories. Military service is one of them.
Besides, now I have something to talk about with any Finn for the rest of my life. Some people even believe that this is the main reason for universal conscription in the country: Finns need to be given an inexhaustible topic for conversations over beer. Shared misery brings them together. They serve with disgust, but afterward they remember it with pleasure.

* Put simply: the open-source ideology holds that software should be free of charge and that any developer should have access to the source code of any program so they can completely change it however they wish.