Linus Torvalds Moving to the Silicon Forest

Evilive writes "According to KATU News, Linus Torvalds and family will be moving to Portland, Oregon so he can oversee the Open Source Development Labs. Torvalds says he and his family will make the move after his children finish school next week. Sayeth Linus: 'The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available) by moving during the summer.'"

Comments

Re:He'll move back - in spite of Intel. OSDL, etc.

[Seumas]

First off, yes the weather is dreary for at least two thirds of the year. Some of us prefer that. Not everyone wants San Diego style weather and Portland is probably more familiar to someone from Finland than most of California, too (although the Bay Area is a bit like Portland as far as weather most of the year).

Second, the cost of housing is cheaper than in the bay area, but still in the top ten or fifteen most expensive in the country.

I wouldn't leave here for anything. I lived in the Bay Area. Didn't like it one bit.

Why?

[CaptainTux]

Let me preface this post by saying this is *not* intended to be a troll post so please don't take it as such. I simply don't understand this fascination with everything Linus...

One of the things that we in the open source movement tout is that "distributiveness" of the developers involved with even major projects like Linux, Apache, etc. Yet, every time Linus moves (be it a job or a home) it is rabidly reported on sites like Slashdot, NewsForge, etc. Why? If the distributed nature of OSS development is one of its strong points then *why* do we care where Linus lives and when or where he moves to?

Linus is a great man who's done humanity a huge good by developing the Linux Kernel. But I'm starting to look at him like I look at Elvis: I think Elvis was a talented musician but I won't have much to do with his music since his "worshippers" have made him a near God. The cult like atmosphere surrounding him is a definate turn-off. The same cult like symptoms are developing around Linus and this spells trouble for OSS. We already have a reputation for being zealots where everything rises and sets around Linux. This kind of rabid fanship just solidifies that image in the publics mind and hurts our cause. Linux is *much* bigger than Linus now and, while he is a star, he is by far not the only one in the community. We need to remember that folks.

Re:Why?

[ktakki]

I agree that there's more to Linux than Linus, but I think I can explain this emphasis on the man rather than his work.

It's part of our culture to look for the human interest angle in any story. It's a staple of news, entertainment, and pretty much any form of mass media. It transforms the abstract to the concrete.

Part of the Linus/Linux appeal, especially among /. readers, is that Mr. Torvalds is an intelligent, well-spoken, down-to-earth person. There's nothing extraordinary about him. He's not a Stephen Hawking super-genius with a nuclear-powered exoskeleton. Linux was the child of an undergraduate with a 386 and an itch to scratch. All the rest was a matter of circumstance (i.e., the AT&T vs. BSD litigation, availability of GNU utilities and Minix, growth of the Internet, etc.). If Linus hadn't done it, it's quite possible that someone else could or would have.

And that's the appeal: any number of people could have created Linux; it took no special talents or extraordinary effort. But Linus is the one who did it, and he told the world about it, and that was the spark that lit the fire. The story has a sort of indie rock DIY ethos about it, which speaks to another cultural phenomenon, that of the lone inventor, the rugged individualist. Of course, Linux is a massively collaborative effort but it took one bored undergrad to get it started.

And this the appeal: it could have been anyone out there. What started in a Finnish dorm room is now something that IBM is willing to back to the tune of billions of dollars. It's the quintessential garage band success story.

Yeah, this story is verging on the over-the-top. What's next, Linus endorses the Atkins Diet? But it's a human interest story and Slashdot is no different from your local news in this respect.

k.

Re:Why?

[tsotha]

It amazes me how many people on this site don't understand why Linus is so important to open source software. It doesn't have anything to do with his coding ability. I agree many people could have written Linux 1.0. But there never would have been a version 2.

The reason he's so important is his ability to lead. You don't find that very often in technical people. To be sure, he's not the only leader. But this kind of distributed project will whither on the vine if you don't have somebody with a little charisma to keep people on the same page.

Re:Good choice, Linus!

[Alioth]

Many people don't like the months of rain every year. They say Portland is the perfect place for slugs and ducks. (However, the rain cleans the air.) Those with the correct philosophical orientation call it Liquid Sunshine.

As someone who lives where it's not only very wet in the winter, but where we usually get hurricane force winds in at least one winter storm, I subscribe to Billy Connolly's outlook.

"There is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes."