Linus Torvalds: King of the duck pond

When you first meet Linus Torvalds what shines out is his apparent shyness.

Inside the headquarters of Transmeta - the Silicon Valley chip-designer that now employs him - I met a man who is admired by millions of people the world over for his outspoken views, yet his presence is almost apologetic.

But once a conversation strikes up, you realise he is anything but shy - in fact he's very vocal. Especially on things that really matter, like open source software, his family and decent saunas.

Linus grew up in downtown Helsinki and spent most of his youth closeted in his bedroom writing code. Both his parents are journalists and his younger sister, Sara, completes the Torvalds household.

"I got my first computer at the age of ten and I've never spent more than few days away from one," he told me. The eccentric family, as he describes it, allowed their only son to spend most of his time in front of a terminal. His mother didn't seem too worried about her son's dislike of ice hockey or other active hobbies.

Sara works as a translator and a journalist in Finland, but still enjoys a close relationship with her brother despite the thousands of miles that now separate them.

She says she didn't notice anything remarkable about her brother when they were growing up. "The only thing I remember is that the phone was always engaged because Linus was reading his emails. Sometimes he would emerge from his room to show me some piece of code, which of course failed to impress me," she laughs.

In Finland, it can seem like everyone knows one another. Linus calls this the duck-pond effect. And he was a member of even a smaller pond: the country's Swedish-speaking community.

The Torvalds family is what other Finns call Finlandsvenskas, Finns with Swedish as their mother tongue. They're in the minority and culturally quite distinct. The rest of the country has been known to treat them with some amusement.

If you become really famous in Finland, no one really cares, as long as you remain committed to promoting the extraordinariness of your country and the importance of saunas.

Saunas are the Holy Grail of Finnishness. Any Finn worth their salt will corner an unsuspecting foreigner and enthuse about the merits of naked group bathing. Linus is no exception. "Foreigners don't understand sauna. It's almost like a religious experience to us," he says.

Torvalds also inherited the Finnish fixation with technology. "We seem to adore communications technology," he says, "which I think is because we don't like talking. Silence is very important. Technology acts as a filter and gives us silent Finns a voice."

Plus it gives us something to talk about.

Linus and technology became even more inseparable during his years at Helsinki University. He was majoring in computer science and the total number of students in the course was two - because it was in Swedish. The duck pond was getting smaller.

He built his own terminal emulator program when there wasn't one available. He spent most of his adolescence without realising what season it was. Nor was he interested in the opposite sex. Code writing was his only true love.

But Linux, as most people know by now, was born almost accidentally during the early nineties. "I was using Minix [Unix variant] as an operating system but there were some technical faults with it, so I decided to write my own operating system."

During the early years of Linux, he entered a flame war with Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, on the merits of kernel design. These flames - posted on user groups - have now became a part of the Linux lore, but at the time they revealed a young man on a mission.

Linus was frustrated with complicated software licensing laws that curb technical innovation so his main objective became to employ the open source principle to his new operating system.

He speaks of the importance of free software in his usual soft tone, but the words are punctuated with passion. "One of the main flaws of the current operating system is that it is too visible. Users don't want to know what sort of technology they are using."

Operating systems are political tools, according to Linus, and users should be freed from such involuntary choices. I ask him if Linux was created to liberate users and developers from the tyranny.

He said: "Maybe not Linux, maybe not Fredix or Diannix or any other type of operating system in specific. My main point is that most intellectual information should be freely available, and especially software source code."

His outspoken views and technical fortitude have made him a poster boy for the OS movement as geeks and nerds world-wide have united in a fight against over-priced, over-marketed and under-performing technology.

Becoming a household name hasn't changed him much. Dressed in the ubiquitous developer's uniform of jeans, vendorware and the legendary socks-and-sandals combo, he answers questions sent in by silicon.com readers with ease.

He adds: "Of course it changes a person when you realise you have created something worthwhile. But I don't think Linux is the only major thing in my life, I didn't get a family by writing code" he laughs.

Linus Torvalds appears to be a happy, peaceful individual at the grand old age of 31. It's obvious his former karate champion wife Tove and his three little daughters are a welcome distraction from the amazing world of operating systems and their kernels.

Which he loves writing, Just for Fun.