Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3) | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)

wired.com

251 pointsolegp82 comments

RedHat's $1m stock is his only big payout, apparently. Rather sad, considering the number of mid-level facebook engineers who will become many times as rich in a few months.

Which of those will be remembered in 200 years. Wanna be the richest guy in the graveyard?

I'd be happy to be that guy ;)

Being the famous guy in the graveyard isn't particularly appealing either.

Millions of tourists who pay tributes to graves and memorials would disagree

None of that would matter for the 'dead guy' in the graveyard.

What matters is your experiences when your alive.

What matters more? The rich guy gets a more comfortable coffin too!

>> None of that would matter for the 'dead guy' in the graveyard.

That's up for the 'dead guy' and his beliefs to consider.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"The man who dies rich, dies disgraced" Andrew Carnegie

as always though, what would more money actually buy him? Early retirement from something he seems to love doing?

I agree but it's still a bit sad to see such a giant gap between the value he brought to the world and the value he retired from it.

Why? It's his choice. He could easily have cashed in to the tune of millions per year. Through public speaking, endorsement deals, etc. He chose not to. His choice, his reasons.

Yeah, but why promote some crap in which he might not believe?

He seems ultimately very comfortable with the way he is living, feel free to prove me wrong but I do not remember seeing any point where he expresses a desire for more money.

I think this community as a whole at times, sees the end goal of money too much as the incentive and can often forget that it is mostly about keeping your head above water, and if doing so you manage to be happy doing what you are doing then that is a massive advantage.

Luckily for the vast majority of us who work in tech, our jobs could equally be said to be our hobbies, I frequently come home from a day of programming to start into a side project. I would much rather work on the wage I'm currently earning, than earn twice as much working in a different field where I cannot wait for the weekend and every morning seems like a struggle.

The gap is quite apparent in many of the tech pioneers life. For example, the late Dennis Ritchie was a pioneer for many, many technologies that I, and many other engineers, used on a daily basis for generating income. This gap for Dennis is enormous!

Whether it would be better for him is debatable, but getting more money to people like Linus is better for all of us because money ≈ power.

It would be a tragedy if he had to spend his time managing a bunch of money he can't take with him anyway instead of doing what he loves and benefiting us all. It would be as big a waste as if he was broke and had to flip burgers to make ends meet. This is a rare case where reality seems to actually be optimized for all involved.

We, the collective we, have done exceptionally well in this deal, and Linus probably has as well.

I, for one, would welcome such a tragedy.

Of course you would. So would I. That's why he wrote the kernel and we... didn't.

You make it sound like such an onerous task to manage tens of millions of dollars. Sure he might feel the need to spend some time on it - but he might just as likely leave it to an investment manager or put it in an index fund. Or even invest some of it in a startup or two.

You only need to spend time managing money if you want to make the most of it.

If you plonk €Xmillion in a bank account getting 2% interest per year, you can forget about it and you and your family can live quite happily.

Rarely would you get higher than inflation returns from just parking money in a bank. In reality it just gets eroded away.

True. Which means that with "just" $1mil, he's going to have to manage his money a bit more than if he had tens of millions.

(maybe there should be a "thank linus" day sometime)

Where does this put Stallman?

Stallmann got a MacArthur Fellowship, worth USD240,000 in 1990 [1], and a Grace Murray Hopper Award and a Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award, which had some money attached. Torvalds and Stallmann also had a share of a 100 million yen prize in 2001. It's not quite in the Zuckerberg league, but it at least means he shouldn't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html

Really? If all I had realized over 22 years was ~US$1.24MM, with nothing else in the pipeline, I'd be seriously concerned about my financial well-being.

Seriously? That's well above many people who are perfectly comfortable with their financial status and do not feel it to be a burden on their lives.

I suppose it's a subjective thing, but it strikes me as a bit much.

It works out to $56K a year, which is significantly above the American median household income. This also assumes Stallman didn't have any other sources of income or income-equivalent over that period.

You don't (and won't) even know their names

How in god's name can the guy who (corrected) had linux named after him ever feel sad?

> How in god's name can the guy who named linux after himself ever feel sad?

He didn't want to; Torvalds named it "Freax", as he says here:

> Honest I didn't want to ever release it under the name Linux because it was too egotistical. What was the name I reserved for any eventual release? Freax. (Get it? Freaks with the requisite X.) In fact, some of the early make files --the files that describe how to compile the sources-- included the word "Freax" for about half a year. But it really didn't matter. At that point I didn't need a name for it because I wasn't releasing it to anybody.

> And Ari Lemke, who insured that it made its way to the ftp site, hated the name Freax. He preferred the other working name I admit that I didn't put up much of a fight. But it was his doing. So I can honestly say I wasn't egotistical, or half-honestly say I wasn't egotistical. But I thought okay, that's a good name, and I can always blame somebody else for it, which I'm doing now.

> -- Linus Torvalds p84 and p88 "Just for fun"

I'm surprised Google hasn't tried to hire him. They hired the inventor of Python, and it would seem up their alley to hire Linus.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did, but I think Linus has carefully avoided working for anyone who might be seen to have a less than neutral stake in Linux. He used to work at Transmeta, a CPU maker, and his first and only Linux-specific employment is at the non-profit Linux Foundation.

That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if Google understands this well and hasn't tried to hire him because it makes sense for Linus to be employed by a neutral party.

Let me assure you that Linus knows full well he has an open offer at Google or any of a dozen companies.

he probably knows that no matter how hard you try, once you're employed by these big companies (or any company really) your values are compromised. Even just a little bit. Usually unconsciously.

And you're under their control. Even just a little bit. Both consciously and unconsciously :)

I do not exclude myself from this observation of course!

A 6000 sq ft house in LO, the most affluent city in Oregon, would run a couple million dollars probably. Throw in the Mercedes and I think he's carved some money out over the years.

I will posit that nobody any significant distance from the west coast knows what "LO" is meant to signify. A little research suggests Lake Oswego, but really...

> I will posit that nobody any significant distance from Portland knows what "LO" is meant to signify.

FIFY

FTFA:

> He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood.

Whoops, it mentioned Lake Oswego in the article, so I thought it would be in context, I'll be clearer in the future.

You're able to control very little about the world and the way things turn out. Many people win the lottery. Heck, what's the point of doing a startup if you were just born into tons of money if money's the final goal?

Richest guy in the graveyard or "remembered" guy in the graveyard, YOU'RE STILL IN THE GRAVEYARD. You can either be miserable your whole life and then some, by always thinking about how you're perceived, or you can easily be content and even be OK with dying knowing you did your best at every step and not "regretting" decisions.

The outward "success" doesn't really mean crap (IMHO). Sure, million bucks is nice, sure recognition is nice, but being true to your passions and being the best you... now that to me is success. It really is in the journey, not the destination, and is hardly something people who aren't extremely close to you would know about.

(To those of you who've already guessed, Viktor Frankl's heavily influenced my views here, so props to him!)

"Steve Jobs dated stars..." part was total crap. The only thing I've ever found in that kind of "success" is emptiness. Give me a hard problem, and let me have a crack at it... I only fail, if I give up out of fear of what I perceive as "ultimate failure" of not being able to solve the problem.

The biggest fail in this article to me was how he's supposedly a dad of three and that part barely gets a mention beyond his license plate. I'm a dad of 3, and it's hard as hell trying to keep up with everything & I love it! I was looking forward to see how Linus does it, and apparently it's by having an interesting license plate... (link bait)

To your last point, something I thought interesting: the kernel _reboot() system accepts his daughters birthdays as magic values.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...

I think that the only reason you actually want lots of money is that you can do what you desire and not have to worry about spending time to actually make a living. Torvalds at least has that covered.

The other reason is so that you can buy expensive stuff to impress your peers, but Linus found another way to impress his peers as well.

The third reason is so you can change the world.

Linus didn't and doesn't need money to change the world. He already did, and continues to do so.

Had the pleasure of meeting Linus last weekend while up in Portland, at a Go Kart facility no less. Super nice guy, but I was a little too star struck to form coherent words. His race nickname was Penguin, :).

I cringed with the S.Jobs comparisons. Journalists should really stop doing this. And this one was completely unwarranted

How is that license plate holder legal? You can't even see the state name, and you have to guess based on the lower loop on the "g".

Don't drive that car into Texas (http://www.senate.state.tx.us/75r/senate/members/dist25/pr03...) or any other state with similar laws...

He could roll Steve Jobs style and have no plate.

Only if he rolls in California, since that's the state where Jobs was exploiting the law.

Linus' blog entry on the pre-Oscar party mentioned in the article - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2011/02/pearls-before-sw...

What's the point of this article? Feels like (tech) celebrity gossip.

"...he rubbed elbows with the likes of Robert Downey Jr., who didn’t know who he was, and Mad Men star Jon Hamm, who did."

I'm mildly disappointed in RD Jr... he had so much geek cred after playing an awesome Iron Man, but I guess that's why it's called acting.

I'm far, far more impressed than Jon Hamm does. I've been a techie all my life, and I would walk straight past Linus if I saw him on the street. I only have a very vague idea of what he looks like.

And why should it otherwise? He's famous for what he's done, not who he is.

That reminds me of this tweet I saw. I was surprised to recognise 11 of 12 (I think. Not positive on the lower left; don't know the one in the wig).

Evidently commissioned by a lover of Clojure: http://twitter.com/#!/ghoseb/status/167501457896120321/photo...

Hah I thought that was Paul McCartney. The one in the middle with the wig is Bach. I can only get half or so. Where is that?

For the record:

Steve Jobs Alan Turing Donald Knuth

John McCarthy J. S. Bach Linus Torvalds

Isaac Newton Rich Hickey Richard Stallman

Edsger Dijkstra Nikola Tesla Dieter Rams

Note that the article doesn't say that Hamm recognized him by his face. They were probably introduced to each other by someone, I'd imagine.

I am really getting sick of everybody and his uncle being compared to Steve Jobs. I mean, a comparison to Woz might not be out of place (both men were technical architects of things that revolutionised the industry), but Steve Jobs was a businessperson with an uncanny eye for industrial design, not the architecture of software.

I am really interested what Linus will do about the metallic taste in the espresso? I hope he will hack the Jura Espresso-Machine and we'll all end up with Linux-Coffee.

Off topic a bit, and maybe this is just me, but is Wired one of the slowest loading sites on the internet for anyone else?

Seems fine for me, took 4 seconds to fully load.

I ask because wired.com pages consistently take 20-30 seconds for me. Ping is on the order of 60 ms just now. Just curious about what makes it so slow for me.

That's odd. I haven't noticed any slowness (and I've loaded the OP several times today).

Taking a brief look at the article's source, it looks like wired uses a huge number of javascript includes. These vary from word press plugins, to tracking analytics, to even a konami code robot.

This, along with the image heavy layout and the fully expanded comments section can probably account for your load times.

It took less than a second, running latest firefox on linux and noscript/adblock/flashblock/etc.

But on the same vein of off topic, I just want to know if the microwave and coffee maker on that picture run linux.

While I could very easily be wrong Linus always struck me as the kind of guy who would want a microwave and coffee maker that just works and wouldn't really care if they run linux or not.

He strikes me as the kind of guy who just wants the best tool for the job. If it doesn't exist, he makes it.

As opposed to Richard Stallman, who probably does not drink coffee unless it comes from a coffee maker running free softare.

Just to be pedantic...

Stallman: I'm less concerned with what happens with embedded systems than I am with real computers. The real reason for this is the moral issues about software freedom are much more significant for computers that users see as a computer. And so I'm not really concerned with what's running inside my microwave oven.

Again, I'm happy if people find GNU/Linux useful for that. If some companies finds it useful in a microwave oven I'll say, "That's nice." But I don't think that's where the social and political issues arise. Those arise where the computers are visible to the user as computers. We can load software into them. We have thus the possibility of sharing and changing software. And then it becomes a significant question whether we are allowed to do so or whether we are blocked from doing so.

Interesting.

I don't agree with Stallman on making this distinction. (I don't agree with him in general, either, though.)

Try installing Ghostery. It blocked 11 external JS files from loading on that page for me.

http://www.ghostery.com/

Amusing anecdote:

A few months back I was at the local Petsmart; getting out of my car I noticed a guy walking toward the store. I thought he looked familiar, so I looked back over my shoulder at him again... I didn't really recognize him but I thought he might have been somebody famous for some reason.

Anyway, when I got back to my car I saw that yellow mercedes, and when read the plate holder saying "Mr. Linux. King of Geeks." I figured out who it was, kind of neat.

At the time I don't think I realized he lived in Portland.

I had no idea he moved to America. Anyone know the reason? Redhat?

Now defunct Transmeta hired him for just in time recompilation of x86 machine code into Transmeta's RISC machine code.

He moved to America in 2004, and became a US citizen in 2010. Two of his kids are US citizens as well (by virtue of having been born there).

I think he moved to the US sometime in the late 90s.

I think you're right. 2004 was probably just his move to Portland.

Proves that if you do what you love, you're bound to be successful.

Interesting... if anything, I see hints (no proof!) of the reverse implication: success => genuine interest.

It proves no such thing. There are many people who do what they love and are failures.

Not really disagreeing with your contention, but there are probably different applicable definitions of "failure" here. It could be argued doing what one loves is inherently successful, etc. (I'm sure you're familiar with the sentiment.)

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