Walter's Reviews > Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

kinda split about this one. i went into it expecting a certain character to linus and finding a totally different one.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised. i had the notion of the "rockstar" shattered many moons ago. in the end, linus is just another guy with flaws just like anyone else. heck, linux wouldn't exist if he hadn't accidentially tried to dial the university of helsinki through /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/tty1.

there's a resiliency and an honesty to him i really like, even if he seems to try to avoid every argument. despite this, he still has less-than-favorable things to say about gates, jobs, stallman, and tanenbaum, to name a few, which is good for a few laughs.

in the end, i enjoyed the fact that the book made the legendary linus unremarkably human. the pithy technical bits at the beginning were great. i wouldn't have liked it as much without them. i'm also not entirely disturbed that the book wasn't entirely composed of them.

the switching back and forth between linus and david was interesting and added a little extra perspective. it also wasn't overused to the point of being annoying, which it certainly could have been.

linus does reveal a few philosophical thoughts-- not just on open source, mind you. he offers his law of life, so to speak. interesting as it is, it is not a life changing insight, nor is really anything else in the book.

let's face it: linus did what he did because he enjoyed hacking. and he liked people getting excited about it and providing him new challenges to flex his hacking muscles. so he kept doing it. he didn't set out to change the world or become rich, but he doesn't mind having done either. i think if there's anything that i learned from this book is that linux is great because it is a global community project.

if lance armstrong can be remembered by "it's not about the bike" then linux should be remembered by "it's not about the [initial] creator."

that being said, though it was entertaining to know about linus, i'd probably not be recommending this book as much as i might recommend reading the gpl. ;)