Many autobiographies of famous people involve a certain amount of ghostwriting, if the subject and alleged author is not a professional writer. An actual writer listens to their stories, interviews them, maybe gets them to draft some anecdotes or chapters, then works all of that up into a narrative that a potential audience might consider readable, all the while trying to maintain some sense of the “authentic” subject’s voice. It is common for that ghostwriter to get a byline on the cover, as in “iWoz” by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, or “Under the Radar” by Robert Young and, in smaller letters, Wendy Goldman Bohm. Sometimes, you have to hunt around to work out who the ghostwriter is, as in “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg (and Nell Scovell, who may have done well to read the message in that very book about getting a seat at the table).
When it comes to Linus Torvalds’ autobiography, “Just for Fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary”, author and technology journalist David Diamond encountered a significant problem: Torvalds could not remember many of the details of his life, and was not too interested in recounting them. This even though Torvalds is a professional writer, who has spent most of his career writing emails, Usenet posts, and commit messages to manage and document the development of the Linux (nee “Freax”) kernel. Of course, he is not always the most politically-adept writer of emails, so maybe it is best that he did not write this book on his own.
As such, “Just for Fun” is two books for the price of one. Most of the chapters adopt Torvalds’ voice, giving us an autobiography that explains such of his life as he can recall. That turns out to be very little that is not about computers, and a lot about the explosive growth of Linux alongside open source business models, and the people he met while working on Linux. Luckily for those of us interested in technology (and specifically, those of us writing a magazine issue about Linux), the latter part is incredibly detailed.
We learn that Linux started life as a terminal emulator that Torvalds wrote to learn more about the 386 processor. He wrote the terminal emulator in the Minix operating system, but it ran as a standalone program that spoke directly to the PC BIOS. As the terminal emulator grew in complexity, Torvalds began to realise that he was writing a simple, shadow operating system and focused on implementing that in a POSIX-compatible way. The rest, as they say, is history (along with quite a few arguments and flame wars).
We get to learn that Torvalds met Bill Joy twice, for example, and walked out on him when Sun described their approach to JINI as open source but he discovered that it was not. He merely met Steve Jobs once, who tried to convince Torvalds to give up on Linux and join Apple on making Mac OS X. As you can probably tell from the way Torvalds stayed at Transmeta and now works for the Linux Foundation, the reality distortion field was not operating at full intensity on that day.
In between these chunks of the book, in italicised tones that try to impart a matter-of-fact, “this is the life of a jobbing ghostwriter” vibe to what must have been an increasingly stressful experience, Diamond’s voice breaks through. In these sections, the book flips from an autobiography to a meta-biography, in which Diamond details the conversations he had with Torvalds, family members, and others, to get the information about Torvalds that is not in the autobiographical sections. We see the life of someone who is writing a life of someone else.
Cover photo by the author.