Pale, fleshy groupies surround him on all sides, adoration in their eyes. Some are overwhelmed, speechless in his presence. Some ask for his autograph; some just want to thank him for all that he's done for them. Some call him a god and want to be among his disciples, helping spread the word.
No, he's not the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or even Mark McGwire. This god is a geek who wears socks with his sandals. His name is Linus Torvalds. He's 28 years old, and his religion is called Linux, after a piece of computer code he wrote for kicks in 1991, while a student at the University of Helsinki, and then loosed upon the world.
In the seven years since, Torvalds' little program has become the center of gravity of a large and somewhat fanatical movement. Programmers love Linux (rhymes with cynics) because it is small, fast and free--and because it lets them participate in building a library of underground software. Silicon Valley loves Linux because it offers an alternative to Sun, Apple and, especially, Microsoft; in the past month Intel, Netscape and some of the Valley's richest venture capitalists have invested in Linux operations. Journalists love Linux--and its Finnish eponym--because his is a story in the classic David and Goliath mold.
Torvalds, like many self-made hacker heroes--and, for that matter, Bill Gates--was drawn to computers at an early age. He's been programming since he was 10 (what else are you going to do in Finland if you hate ice hockey?), when Granddad brought home a Commodore VIC-20 and recruited Linus to be his "right-hand man." Linus immediately started using the VIC-20 to write his own computer games.
Linux was born when Torvalds bought his first PC and decided he didn't like the operating system that came with it (Microsoft's DOS) as much as the one that controlled the university's minicomputers (Unix). Since there wasn't a version of Unix that ran on the PC, he set out to write his own. The next few months are a blur. "Forget about dating! Forget about hobbies! Forget about life!" he says, remembering that heady time. "We are talking about a guy who sat, ate and slept in front of the computer."
Then he did something really unusual in the make-a-quick-billion computer industry. He made Linux available for free on the Internet. More important, he released his source code, the instruction set used to create the software, so that fellow programmers could hack, hone and redistribute Linux at will. In doing so he was following a freeware tradition that goes back to the earliest days of computing.
He also became the beneficiary of that tradition, since thousands of freeware programs originally written to run on Unix also run on Linux. A CD-ROM loaded with Linux and a library of software can be purchased for $49 from Red Hat Software in Durham, N.C., or downloaded for free on the Net www.linuxresources.com) There is even a Windows-type front end that makes Linux a little easier for ordinary mortals to use. Today the number of machines running Linux is estimated at 7 million.