This article is more than 1 year old

Leningrad Penguin Goes America

Murdoch to publish Torvalds auto-biog

Cult Finnish movie director Aki Kaurismaki will direct a lavish bio-pic of the life of Linus Torvalds, it was announced yesterday.

Tentatively titled Leningrad Penguins go America, Torvalds' life will be portrayed in a tableaux of musical numbers including 'Tanenbaum, Tanenbaum - Your Faith In Microkernels Is Misplaced!', 'Maddog lends me an Alpha' and - apparently the showstopper - 'glibc, or not glibc?'

OK, so we made it up.

But Torvalds will at least provide some potential primary source material, in the form of an autobiography, publisher HarperCollins announced yesterday. The book will be entitled Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary and is slated for publication next spring.

"It's as much as about Linux as it is about Linus," promised a flack for the Murdoch-owned publishing house.

The book is being co-written (the phrase normally deployed here is 'ghost-written', but we can safely assume that Linus will be speaking for himself) by former Wired reporter David Diamond.

Diamond has a singular knack for teasing out the hidden personal particulars of his subject, if this lovely profile he penned for the San Jose Mercury earlier this year is anything to go by.

HarperCollins' blurb promises us a tome free of forward-looking statements - so at least we'll be spared a retread of Bill Gates' 1995 visionary tome The Road Ahead, which failed to mention the Internet. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like