Linus Torvalds Announces Autobiography

Keith Whitsitt wrote in to say that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is writing his autobiography. Published by HarperCollins, co-authored by David Diamond, entitled "Just for Fun:The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary". The article is pretty funny, talking about how it will reflect Torvalds "Quirky irreverent personality" as well as how it will be about business, Linus, and Linux. Hell I'll read it, but isn't Linus a bit young for the autobiography? I keep pitching my epic space opera about alien robots who infest our planet and live off celebrities dryer lint to various publishers, but nobody wants to publish a book written by a leader of mexican food, and starring a hero named Litmus VanCenturfuge and his sidekick Pipet Jerks. I keep telling them my parents would buy copies. I bet Linus will sell copies to people besides his parents.

Re:bad publisher choice

How about Penguin?

Re:Revolutionary?

No.

Linus has played and continues to play a part in starting a revolution in computing. Whether he did that by "reimplmenting a 30 year old OS" or by having entirely new ideas or by redecorating his house, or by shaving his head, or by anything else at all is unimportant.
The undenyable fact is that the way people (including individuals and businesses) view computers and their operating systems is changing. This is due in part to the work of Linus. That makes him a revolutionary.

Thompson and Richtie are more like visionarys than revolutionaries (acciedental or otherwise) to me. (as is RMS for that matter)

Re:Coming Soon...

I'd suggest Linus - The Christmas Ornament, but Hallmark already has a few I'll wager, in its Peanuts collection...

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Not sure how interesting this book will be

I don't know about this. Linus decided to write a UNIX kernel because he didn't like Windows or MS-DOS. Brilliant, that he pulled it off. But in all honesty, he's pretty much spent the last ten years tweaking his kernel and managing other people. That's cool, but an _autobiography_?

Linus became a folk hero because of what his creation touched off. It enabled idealistic rants of a previous generation of isolated and fading UNIX geeks to go mainstream. And it isn't the kernel that gets attention any more, but KDE and Gnome and The Gimp and Apache and all the application people who are trying to conquer the world.

I expect Linus's book to be on par with "Weaving the Web," by the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. It was interesting in a technical sense, but it was obvious that his views and ideas were not what people think of when they think about the web.

As someone who sees him self as part writer..

I think it's critical to pen an autobiography early in life as it will be a chapter in your real biography which will be written after your death or late in your life.

This will be the chapter where the world is first exposed to your true arrogance, your insecurities,your odd behaviorisms, and all that stuff you didn't want them to see initially. Just think about how they will react. Getting that monkey off your back has to be a taste of true freedom that will enable you do go that much farther next time. This is a critical step in character development for the character of you in the real biography.

I say that whoever signed this deal also extends one to Stallman. I know that cat has some stories to tell.

Coming Soon...

Linus - The Action Figure
Linus - The Breakfast Cereal
Linus - The Fragrance

Re:Revolutionary?

Thompson and Richtie are more like visionarys than revolutionaries

Exactly. Re-inventing a thirty year old OS is precisely revolutionary, it's history comming around again, revolving back to where it used to be.

Raising a people's army and overthrowing the government isn't new, it's been done thousands of times before, but that doesn't stop it being revolutionary.

Pre......

bad publisher choice

HarperCollins? Couldn't he have picked a better publisher? As far as I'm concerned, HarperCollins has the worst reputation for publishing tabloid quality books of any publisher that I know.

If I recall correctly, HarperCollins published Canter and Siegel's book, "How to make a fortune on the information superhighway". Canter and Siegel were the green card attorneys that "invented" spamming to newsgroups. They ruined usenet for everyone. And HarperCollins published their book, explaining how to do it.

I still have my original Joel Furr "Green Card" T-Shirt.
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Revolutionary?

So, reimplmenting a 30 year old OS is revolutionary now?

Thompson and Richtie may be revolutionaries for designing unix in the first place, but redoing someone elses work hardly seems revolutionary.

Heck, someone is going to call Gjs Van Sant's Psycho original next...

Re:Revolutionary?

So, reimplmenting a 30 year old OS is revolutionary now?

Yes, because amazingly, after he reimplemented a decades old OS, people started using it. Something about his project attracted people, and that's a social achievement, combined with good luck/fate (e.g. BSD's legal troubles).

Luck, being in the right place at the right time, resulting in social achievement ... sounds like every revolution I've ever heard of.

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It's just his versioning system

When he wants to publish "Linus Version Two: Just Outta Beta" forty years from now, will HarperCollins still have the rights?

He's just getting a head start, just like other famous "younger" people like Tiger Woods [amazon.com]. When he's in his seventies, he'll publish all over again to appeal to the gray-haired Geek Generation.

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I'm thinking that the book should be free here...

I think that Linus should do what Greenspun did when negotiating the rights to his book "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing". The publisher got to put the book in print, but Greenspun retained the right to put the book online. Brilliant, I say. Linus should do the same.