Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (18 page)

As a result of the messy squirmish, I hold the Linux trademark. What that means is, when companies like VA Linux file for an IPO, their prospectus has to mention the fact that the company doesn’t even own the trademark for half of its name. (In that particular case, the company was involved in the legal process of getting approval from me to use the word Linux.) But I’ve gotten accustomed to that sort of thing.

The trademark episode was just an unexpected growing pain for Linux. And a distraction. But no sooner was it settled then another surfaced: An engineer at Intel’s research lab in Portland, Oregon, said his company was using Linux in its exploration of new architectures. He asked me if I wanted to move there for a six-month internship.

Tove and I had spoken in vague terms about possibly living in the United States. She knew how much I had enjoyed my few visits there, root beer notwithstanding. We agreed that the opportunities—not to mention the climate—were better in America. (By the way, I am totally convinced that the U.S. system of motivating employees is far more realistic, and produces better results, than the European model. In Finland if a worker is much better than his colleagues, you give him just a little more money and keep it very quiet. In America, you give him a lot more money—and it works.) The internship seemed like a great way of testing the waters, or, since it was in the Pacific Northwest, the rainwaters, and we agreed that I should pursue the opportunity. But I was ambivalent. I felt a bit uneasy about leaving school without having finished my master’s. Something inside me, possibly the memory of my professor grandfather, didn’t take to the notion of being a dropout. In the end, my feelings didn’t even matter. The engineer’s manager decided that it would be difficult for me to obtain the required six-month work permit from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for the internship.

So we stayed in Helsinki. By the time Finland’s legendary revelers were toasting the arrival of New Year’s Day, 1996, I was inching toward the master’s degree finish line. I only needed to complete one small course to finish the credit requirements. And I also had to write my thesis. Ironically, it would be the first time I got any academic credit for my work on Linux, which had consumed most of my life throughout my college years.

The year 1996 brought with it a wake-up call. In egalitarian Finland, you get a state-mandated seniority raise after you’ve been at a job for three years. When I saw my first pay stub reflecting the new salary, I felt a jolt: I had been working at the university long enough to be given seniority. Would I spend my entire working career there? Was I destined to become my grandfather? Remember my description of him from earlier in this book: bald, overweight, and not smelling like anything. I started checking myself in the mirror with some regularity. My hairline was creeping back a couple of millimeters. Extra kilos seemed to have made their way to my once-skinny torso. I was twenty-six and for the first time in my life I was feeling old. I had been at the university for going on seven years; I knew I could graduate fairly quickly if I got my act together.

“
The penguin was my idea,” says Tove. “Linus was trying to find a symbol for Linux because people were asking, ‘Shouldn’t there be a symbol?’ He was thinking of things he’d seen. The Linux companies had their own symbols. One of the companies had a pink triangle as its symbol. But I knew that was the international symbol for gays, so I told him that had already been taken. He said he would like to have something nice, something sympathetic.

“
So when he started looking for a symbol I said, ‘Why don’t you have a penguin because you fell in love with those penguins?’ He said, ‘Okay, I’II think about it.
’
”

“
No, it was not her idea,” he says. “She’s wrong.”

This was a departure. Linus and Tove don’t make a habit of disagreeing. Tove is astounding in her ability to deftly handle the responsibilities of the girls and the household—and a famous husband
—
fending off journalists with her karate skills. Linus seems downright cheerful about chipping in by occasionally folding laundry or doing his morning chore of making the cappuccino. Even during the stress of a ten-hour car trip with the on-again-off-again needs of a pair of young kids, Linus and Tove handle it all smoothly: Think of the marital equivalent of a well-crafted Scandinavian sofa bed.

Tove has her take on this version. “He thought it wasn’t a good idea after all, because it was
my
idea. He went on thinking about a possible symbol. Then we were in Boston with Maddog and Henry Hall. They started talking about the symbol. I said to them, ‘What about a penguin. Do you think it’s nice?’ They said yes. I think that made Linus think it might be a good idea after all.”

“
Henry Hall said he knew an artist who could draw it for him, but that never happened. The next thing I knew, Linus had asked on the Internet if there were people who wanted to send in pictures of
penguins.” He chose a version by Larry Ewing, a graphic artist who works at the Institute for Scientific Computing at Texas A&M University.

III

News of my decision to work for Transmeta Corporation was greeted with the same reaction in the Linux community as was the news that Tove and I had figured out how to conceive a child and were expecting one at the end of 1996.

When word leaked out in the spring that Tove was pregnant, the more vocal among Linux user newsgroup participants wanted to know how I planned on balancing the demands of Linux maintenance with those of a family. A few months later, when it became known that I would (finally) be leaving the University of Helsinki to work for the secretive Transmeta in Silicon Valley, the big, worldly debate centered on whether I could possibly keep true to my open source philosophy in a dreaded commercial environment, as opposed to a neutral academic institution. Transmeta was partly funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, folks declared in protest; some claimed it must be an elaborate scam for taking control of Linux.

I’m not saying those aren’t valid concerns for loyal members of the Linux community, but it’s just… gimme a break! The fact is, neither the birth of Patricia in December 1996 (and Daniela sixteen months later and Celeste forty-eight months later) nor my job at Transmeta, which began in February 1997, has caused the downfall of Linux. I felt all along that if anything were to negatively affect my work with Linux, I would have taken the obvious necessary step of turning it all over to somebody I trust.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the spring of 1996, just as the weather was breaking, I finished the last of my required coursework for my master’s. It was about this time that I heard from Peter Anvin, the Linux community member who three years earlier had organized the online collection that helped me pay off my first PC. Like everybody else who prowled the Linux newsgroups, he knew I would soon be graduating. He had been working at Transmeta for about a year, and approached his boss to explain that he knew this guy in Finland who might be good for the company. He came to meet with me briefly while he was visiting his mother in Sweden. He talked up Transmeta, which was pretty hard to do since it was in stealth mode and he couldn’t tell me much of anything. The rumor among programmers was only that it was involved in developing “programmable chips.” At the very least it was great to meet Peter in person.

A week after he returned to California, he sent me an email asking when I could come. This was hugely different from the experience I had had with Intel a year earlier, when an engineer wanted to hire me for an internship but it never happened because of the paperwork issues.

It would be fun just to get a trip to California, I thought.

This was the first job interview of my life. I didn’t have a CV. I didn’t know what Transmeta was doing; it was in a strange land.

I was more worried about the implications of moving to the United States than about getting the job itself, so I didn’t even think of my meetings as being interviews. What mattered more, it seemed, was to learn what these guys were up to. It was a fairly strange interview situation.

After the first day, I went back to my hotel across the street from Transmeta’s office-park headquarters. In my jet-lagged state I thought it was all interesting, but I also thought that the folks at Transmeta were crazy. At that point the company didn’t have any silicon at all. No hardware. Everything was done with a simulator, and the demonstration of the simulation booting into Windows 3.11 and running solitaire did little to convince me that anything was going to happen. After that first day I wondered if it wasn’t all a waste. I distinctly remember thinking: Maybe this isn’t going to turn out—either as a technological innovation for Transmeta or a job for me.

I literally slept on it. Actually, it wasn’t much of a sleep. I lay in bed thinking about Transmeta’s plans. Then I started fantasizing about having a backyard palm tree. Then I started ruminating over what I had seen on the simulator. It was a memorable, fitful night, but nothing like the frostbitten anxiety of Ede.

By morning, I was somewhat excited. By the end of the second day, I was very excited. That’s when the stress began.

Before accepting Transmeta’s offer, I talked it over with various people. When word got out that I was considering the job, I received a number of other offers. In Finland I got an offer from Tele, which was using Linux in some capacity. Through Maddog I got an offer at Digital. (No offense, but Boston in winter isn’t a whole lot better than Helsinki in winter. Okay, maybe it is.) I talked to some of the Red Hat people. They offered me a job and said they would pay better than Transmeta was paying, even though they had no idea what the proposed salary was because I hadn’t even discussed money with the company. The Red Hat crowd said they would even top Transmeta’s stock options, whatever they would be. But I wasn’t interested in working for any particular Linux company—even one that was fortunate enough to be located in the middle of North Carolina.

In the end, I got five job offers without ever formally looking for a job. Transmeta’s was the most exciting, by far.

I said yes. It felt weird. The next thing I did was tell the university I would be leaving.
That’s
when the stress really began. For me, it was a giant step that meant there was no turning back. We were having a new child, moving to a new country, and I was leaving the safe nest of the University of Helsinki—but first I had to write my thesis. In retrospect, I guess getting all those changes over at once was a good idea. But it was madness.

There was no formal announcement (why should there be?).

Just word circulating on the Internet, and the aforementioned debate about whether I would be able to remain true to Linux and free software in the evil corporate environment, and between the changing of diapers. Back then, people had this view of Linux as something that was mainly developed by university students, not settled-down people. I guess it was understandable that they would be nervous.

I wrote my thesis over a long weekend and turned it in minutes before taking Tove to the hospital to deliver Patricia, who was born forty hours later. That was December 5th, 1996. Being a father seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The next several weeks we were busy with Patricia and constantly worrying about obtaining the approvals for our U.S. visa paperwork, which was taking forever. We figured it would help if we were married, so sometime in January—I always have to ask Tove the date—we went to a government office to be officially wed. We had three guests: Tove’s parents and my mother. (My dad was in Moscow). It was a strange time. At some point we shipped most of our belongings to the United States without knowing when we would be able to fly out. To say good-bye to all of our friends, we hosted a housecooling party, the reverse of a housewarming. Twenty people crammed into the small, recently emptied one-bedroom apartment. In good Finnish tradition, everybody got drunk.