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Oof. I’ve been very remiss in my updates. Look for more posts in the next few days. First things first, though, here’s an update on 12-in-12.

In February, I read Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. Overall, I really enjoyed it. Readers who are expecting a line-by-monospaced line breakdown of the birth of Linux will be very disappointed, however, as the book focuses much more on the circumstances that made Linus into a determined coder rather than on the technical details of his OS. The biographical narratives of his formative years are charming, and Linus has a dry, nerdy wit that comes through and keeps the story moving.

It took me a while to get used to the dueling narrators structure of the book. Rather than playing the role of ghost writer (or maybe rather than just playing the role of ghost writer), Diamond trades off narrating chapters with Torvalds. I think this would have been easier for me to take if Diamond’s chapters weren’t printed entirely in italics. I think the shift from first- to third-person narration could just as easily have been illustrated with a change in typeface, rather than style.

About the last quarter of the book is devoted to Linus explaining his opinions on copyright and free and open-source software (FOSS), which as you might imagine, are plentiful. Torvalds’s OS has become the defacto poster child for open-source, despite his very public conflicts with Richard Stallman, creator of the GPL, the license which has facilitated the protection and creation of FOSS. It probably says more about my geek orientation than about the quality of the writing, but I found this part of the book to be the most interesting and engaging.

Anyway, recommended as a quick read for those of you who are interested in the early days of open-source, nerd biography, or italics.