Just for Fun

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To Tove and Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste. I always wanted to be surrounded by young women, and you made it so.

To Tia and Kaley. Boy do I feel blessed.

This wouldn't qualify as acknowledgments without the dropping of some important names, so here goes:

We acknowledge our editor, Adrian Zackheim, who caved in to our every demand; Erin Richnow, the HarperCollins assistant editor who was more on top of this project than we were; our agents, Bill Gladstone of Waterside Productions and Kris Dahl of ICM, who couldn't have been speedier in the forwarding of our checks to us; Sara Torvalds, who has the best backup memory on the Fennoscandia peninsula - and operates in three languages - and William and Ruth Diamond, who read the original manuscript and kept repeating, "No, really, it's good. "

During the euphoria of the final years of the twentieth century, a revolution was happening among all the other revolutions. Seemingly overnight, the Linux operating system caught the world's attention. It had exploded from the small bedroom of its creator, Linus Torvalds, to attract a cultish following of near-militant geeks. Suddenly it was infiltrating the corporate powerhouses controlling the planet. From a party of one it now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antarctica, and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Not only was it the most common operating system running server computers dishing out all the content on the World Wide Web, but its very development model-an intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer computer programmers-had grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world.

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