Linus Torvalds' double life

"I wrote it over a year, mostly over a summer. I basically ate slept and programmed. Girlfriends? No."

He says he has groupies, "if you count the people that want an autograph." He's no Tom Jones though. "Nobody throws their underwear at me," he said with a laugh.

He is married, with two children. And he frequently takes his family to conferences when he speaks and includes a week in his itinerary to tour the city where the conference is held.

Since Linux is free, he makes no money directly from it, but the exposure he got from it drew the attention of Transmeta, a mysterious Silicon Valley company where he's been working as a programmer for two years.

What he can say about the company is limited.

"They're not a very forthcoming company. You can search on the Net and find lots of rumors, including alien technology," said Torvalds, who had to sign a lengthy non-disclosure agreement just to evaluate a job opportunity with them.

The company has a Web page, which says: "This web page is not here yet." In the notes in the page's source code it says: "There are no secret messages in the source code to this web page. There are no tyops (sic) in this web page."

Someone at Transmeta has a sense of humor, including Torvalds.

"I can neither deny nor confirm the rumor that we're working with the Alsatians doing a laser gun," he said with a wry grin.

The rumors are distributed on an internal mailing list at Transmeta, "People read it for comic relief," he said.

The most pervasive rumors suggest that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen backs Transmeta. It may also be developing a microprocessor chip (2007 update: it did!).

According to Salon magazine, "There is some hard evidence that Transmeta is working on chip designs for graphics processing. Transmeta is a member of VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, as well as AGP-IF, the Accelerated Graphics Port Implementers Forum."

Whatever the start-up company is doing, it won't have a product for about a year, according to Salon.

"You should assume that all of (the rumors) are wrong," said Torvalds, "but you shouldn't take that for granted either. Maybe somebody has it right on."

« Previous Page  1 | 2 | 3