Just for Fun by Linus Benedict Torvalds and David Diamonds

L: Basically it is short and sweet. It won’t give your life any meaning, but it tells you what’s going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life––for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you’ve reached the third stage, you’re done. But you have to go through the other stages first.

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So where is technology taking us? In my opinion, the next big step is entertainment.

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So what this builds up to is that in the end we’re all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.

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I don’t even remember when I got really into computers at all. It started slowly, and it grew on me.

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I don’t know how many other preteen boys sat in their grandfather’s room, being taught how to simplify arithmetic expressions and type them correctly into a computer, but I remember doing that.

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And I started reading the manuals for the computer, typing in the example programs. There were examples of simple games that you could program yourself. If you did it right you wound up with a guy that walked across the screen, in bad graphics, and then you could change it and make the guy walk across the screen in different colors. You could just do that.

It’s the greatest feeling.

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I’m the same way—famous for zoning out. When I’m sitting in front of the computer, I get really upset and irritable if somebody disturbs me. Tove could elaborate on this point.

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And I basically sat in front of a computer for four years.

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So I would be sitting in front of a computer and be perfectly happy.

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I studied at the university for eight years, emerging with nothing more than a mere master’s degree.

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There are other traits that distinguish Finns from other members of the human species. For example, there’s this silence tradition. Nobody talks much. They just sort of stand around not saying anything.

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Finland has the world’s highest literacy rate, and university tuition is free, which is why the typical student sticks around for six or seven years. Or, in my case, eight years. You can’t help learning something by hanging around a university for such a large chunk of your life.

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The book that launched me to new heights was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

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Unix, on the other hand, comes with a small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression.

This, by the way, is also how physics works. You try and find the fundamental rules that are supposed to be fairly simple. The complexity comes from the many incredible interactions you get from those simple rules, not from any inherent complexity of the rules themselves.

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Mikke laughs as she relives the years in which Linus hid in his room, slaving away on a computer. “Nicke kept saying to me, ‘Kick him out, make him get a job,’ but Linus wasn’t bothering me. He didn’t require much. And whatever it was he was doing with his computer, that was his business, his thing, and he had a right to do it. I had no idea what it was all about.”

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I don’t know how to really explain my fascination with programming, but I’ll try. To somebody who does it, it’s the most interesting thing in the world. It’s a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own rules and where the end result is whatever you can make of it.

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What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how.

I’m personally convinced that computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference, of course, is that while in physics you’re supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you create the world. Within the confines of the computer, you’re the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If you’re good enough, you can be God. On a small scale.

And I’ve probably offended roughly half the population on Earth by saying so.

But it’s true. You get to create your own world, and the only thing that limits what you can do are the capabilities of the machine—and, more and more often these days, your own abilities.

Most of the time you’re not doing that. You’re simply writing a program to do a certain task. In that case, you’re not creating a new world but you are solving a problem within the world of the computer. The problem gets solved by thinking about it. And only a certain kind of person is able to sit and stare at a screen and just think things through. Only a dweeby, geeky person like me.

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It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way.

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The point about open source has never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more open to other people’s suggestions. That’s never been the issue. The issue is that even if I’m the blackest demon from Hell, even if I’m outright evil, people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves. It’s not about me being open, it’s about them having the power to ignore me. That’s important.

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With a million eyes, all software bugs will vanish.

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Survive. Socialize. Have fun. That’s the progression. And that’s also why we chose “Just for Fun” as the title of this book. Because everything we ever do seems to eventually end up being for our own entertainment—at least if we have been given the possibility to progress far enough.