There’s a stylistic choice in Linus Torvalds’ Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, I suspect put there by the mass-market writing savvy co-author David Diamond, to intersperse the tale of Linux’s development and rise to (server market, at least) dominance with little vignettes of Linus’s daily life and casual conversations (rants?) about this and that. This is the sort of thing that usually makes me groan, but it’s tolerable somehow in Just for Fun.
In the opening, the author is discussing the progression of human activities from a focus on survival to a focus on entertainment. (It’s presented as a transcript of a talk between the authors, with Linus’s wife and young daughter chiming in with cute mundanities while on a road trip. Who knows if it actually happened that way. Again, this crap is usually off-putting but I found myself tolerating it here.)
It isn’t deep, but its a good setup for what comes about 200 pages later in a section called “The Amusement Ride Ahead”:
…nobody even wants a computer. What everybody wants is this magical toy that can be used to browse the Web, write term papers, play games, balance the checkbook, and so on.
This, coming from the man who didn’t like working with the Minix OS that was available to him so coded his own operating system.
Its true. I want Linux to be invisible, to deliver its functionality to me in ways that I don’t need to think about. (Unless I’m bored and poking around Linux settings. Just for Fun™.) A critic could look at the predictions made in this section and argue that Linux has failed. But I would say it has mostly succeeded. Linus ends his predictions with this:
And where is Linux itself, and open source generally, in all this? You won't even know. It will be inside those Sony machines.
Ok, this part is wrong. Playstation’s flirtation with Linux in the PS3 era ended in a class action lawsuit. But stay with me here. It goes on.
You'll never see it, you'll never know it, but it's there, making it all run. It will be in that cell phone, which is at the same time acting as your very own personal communications hub for the rest of your electronic widgets when you're away from your wireless local area network.
You'll see. It's only a matter of time. And money.
I’m typing this post on an Android tablet, running a modified version of the Linux kernel. My words are being saved, keystroke by keystroke, on Substack’s Linux servers. If you receive this post in email form, you will in all likelihood be interfacing with your own space on a Linux server to access your mail. You may even be doing so on your own Android device. None of us are thinking about any of these things. We’re just thinking of getting and sharing information. Linux and open source are invisibly carrying us along.
I’ve always liked this joke from David Foster Wallace:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water"
Thanks for reading my blog.