Linus Torvalds: The Reluctant Titan Behind Linux and Git

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Linus Torvalds was named after both Nobel chemist Linus Pauling and the blanket-carrying kid from Peanuts, and this episode argues the pairing fits. Born in Helsinki in 1969 to journalist parents in Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he started on a VIC-20 at age 11 and, because software was so hard to buy, taught himself to write machine code directly. After 11 months in the Finnish Navy as an artillery observer, he bought an Intel 386 clone in 1991 and began a kernel he described as just a hobby.

That hobby became the engine under Android phones, web servers, and smart thermostats. The episode follows the choices that made it possible: switching Linux to the GPLv2 license, refusing Steve Jobs when Apple asked him to drop Linux, and building Git in a matter of days in 2005 after the BitKeeper arrangement collapsed. It also covers the cost of his role as benevolent dictator, from years of abusive mailing list emails to his 2018 apology and time away.

• He wanted to call the kernel Freax, but the friend who ran the university server named the directory Linux without asking him.
• Stock options from Red Hat and VA Linux briefly pushed his net worth to around $20 million during the dot-com boom.
• In 2000 he turned down a Mac OS job from Steve Jobs, partly because he disliked Apple's Mach microkernel design and preferred a monolithic kernel.
• After a 2012 talk where he gave Nvidia the middle finger on camera, and questions from The New Yorker in 2018, he apologized and the Linux community adopted a code of conduct.
• He met his wife Tove, a six-time Finnish national karate champion, when she answered a class test email by asking him out, and the kernel's reboot magic values encode their daughters' birth dates in hexadecimal.