From the Publisher:
Ten years ago, college student Linus Torvalds retreated to his own computer to write code. He quips, "I couldn't afford software that I liked, so I wrote my own operating system." Not only did he write the operating system, he gave it away and invited other software engineers to improve it.
The rest is history. Today, Torvalds has become the key figure in the open source software movement. The powerful operating system he wrote, Linux, has grown into a major force in the computer industry, while its voluntary development model has made Linux the world's largest collaborative project. Hundreds of the world's best engineers contribute to the improvement of Linux. Over 12 million machines, including many of the servers that power the World Wide Web, now run on Linux, as do the top-of-the-line offerings from such hardware giants as IBM and Compaq.
Just for Fun chronicles Torvalds's amazing life—from his eccentric childhood in Finland, to his gangly, geeky teenage years when his greatest joy was writing programs on his grandfather's VIC-20 computer, to his rise to world-wide fame with Linux. Brimming with Torvalds's candid observations and opinions, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to know where high tech and business are going in the future.
Cited By
- Geiger R, Howard D and Irani L (2021). The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5:CSCW1, (1-28), Online publication date: 13-Apr-2021.
- Balestra M, Cheshire C, Arazy O and Nov O Investigating the Motivational Paths of Peer Production Newcomers Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (6381-6385)
- Arazy O, Liifshitz-Assaf H, Nov O, Daxenberger J, Balestra M and Cheshire C On the "How" and "Why" of Emergent Role Behaviors in Wikipedia Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, (2039-2051)
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- Rossi C and Bonaccorsi A (2005). Why profit-oriented companies enter the OS field?, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 30:4, (1-5), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2005.
- Rossi C and Bonaccorsi A Why profit-oriented companies enter the OS field? Proceedings of the fifth workshop on Open source software engineering, (1-5)