Torvalds is still doing things just for fun. He's a free operator who pulls no punches in technical online discussions, but he's not a blowhard. It's enough to give him geek credibility, but to keep him from alienating the smart people. The makers of SUSE Linux know what we're talking about.
The Job Offer From Steve Jobs
That passion to make the right design choice is still what drives Torvalds, even as Linux enters its comfortable middle age. "Linus, the person, certainly like all of us, he's gotten older," says Dirk Hohndel, the diving-buddy of Torvalds' who also happens to be chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel. "But Linus, the god of Linux, has not changed at all. He is still the same fiery aggressive, flaming wild, determined true-believer -- the person who really knows exactly what he wants."
Torvalds may have been a foil to Gates, but Linux's creator probably has more in common with Steve Jobs. Torvalds leads the Linux project, not so much by writing code, but by arbitrating disputes and making the technical decisions that keep the project moving in the right direction. And that's ability is similar to Jobs' fanatical attention to design detail, says Google's Allison.
"Jobs had this wonderful design sense of taste. He created these beautiful products that everybody loved," he says. "Linus has engineering taste, and that's the thing that kind of makes him special. He can look at all these potentially competing solutions and cut through the bullsh*t and say, no this is the right one to choose."
"He's good at that," Allison adds. "It means he's a dick sometimes, but he's good at it."
Torvalds has never met Bill Gates, but around 2000, when he was still working at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple's Cupertino campus and tried to hire him. "Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch," says Torvalds. The condition: He'd have to drop Linux development. "He wanted me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things," he said. That was a non-starter for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS's Mach kernel.
"I said no," Torvalds remembers.
Jobs He's Not
But the Jobs-Torvalds analogy breaks down pretty quickly. Jobs was fabulously wealthy, dated celebrities, and didn't write cute things about his kids on his license plate. In fact, he didn't even use license plates. And when he had a software problem at Apple, he didn't sit down and write an amazing new program that solved the issue. Torvalds has done that kind of thing.
On the day Wired visited Torvalds last month, his slightly obsessive attention to detail was on full display. Torvalds quickly invited us in and immediately starting making espresso after espresso in his modern kitchen. His employer, the Linux Foundation, had just bought him a brand new $3,000 Jura espresso maker, and he and his wife Tove were concerned that something is wrong.
Tove had been complaining about a metallic aftertaste, and Torvalds thought it may be a problem too. He handed over an espresso, asking: "Do you taste it?"
