Baring It All for Linux

Did you know about the giant sauna in the basement of the Finnish Embassy?

In the fall of 2003, I began a column for USA Today like this: “I am naked with Linus Torvalds’ father.”

OK, ahem, so…in 2003 Linus Torvalds was a big deal in the tech world. He grew up in Finland and had created the Linux computer operating system in the 1990s. At the time, Microsoft was the industry superpower in operating systems and made a fortune selling Windows. Linux was the first well-known open source software, which meant no one owned it and any coder could work on it and improve it. Individuals and companies could use it for free.

Linux was a concept that turned the tech industry on its head and generally made Microsoft executives apoplectic.

This made Linus Torvalds a Robin Hood-like hero around the world and a superstar in Finland, which at the time was enjoying a reputation as a peculiar and surprising tech hub. Nokia, once a Finnish lumber and rubber company, had made itself into a world leader in cell phones. Helsinki had an emerging startup scene. Finland was having a moment.

The Finnish government wanted to make sure Americans knew this. So the Finnish embassy in Washington would from time to time invite Finnish political and tech leaders to D.C. and host an event, inviting U.S. politicians, business leaders and the media. As the tech columnist for USA Today – then the largest-circulation newspaper in America – I often got invited. And, being the manic networker that I was in those days, I usually went.

In the fall of 2003, Wired magazine put Linus Torvalds on its cover. The Finnish embassy figured that was a great reason to hold one of its celebratory events. The invitation said that Linus would be there. It also said that everyone would be invited into the embassy’s sauna after dinner.

You don’t get a lot of invitations like that.

This sounded too good to pass up – meet Linus Torvalds, see some of my Finnish friends, and experience the uniquely Finnish tendency to mix business with naked group sweating. As I noted in the column, hanging in a sauna serves a similar purpose in Finland as a round of golf with potential clients does in the U.S. Nokia had a huge sauna in its corporate headquarters. Even small businesses would typically have one.

So, I put on a suit and trekked to the stylish Finnish compound. When I arrived, I found out Linus couldn’t make it. But his father, Nils Torvalds, was there instead. I did not know anything about Nils Torvalds. When we all – maybe 40 or so guests – got ushered to dinner at an elegant long table, I was placed next to him, and we hit it off. Nils, I quickly learned, was a famous television journalist in Finland, and at the time was stationed in Washington covering U.S. politics.

Nils – who I described as “a lanky, athletic man with scruffy, hip-looking facial hair” – turned out to be a fabulous conversationalist, and an out-of-left-field insight into his son. While everyone else was writing about how Linus came up with and managed Linux, I learned about Linus’ origins and pedigree. Nils, for instance, informed me that Linus’ grandfather, Ole Torvalds (also known as Karanko), had been a super famous poet and journalist. In the column I wrote: “Perhaps you've read his Mellan is och eld. No?”

Yeah, me neither.

Anyway, we had a nice dinner, and as it was ending, the hosts announced that it was time for the women to go to the sauna in the basement while the men went to the bar and downed a couple more cocktails. And so, the women disappeared, and I drank with Nils and a handful of American tech journalists I knew pretty well. Maybe 30 minutes later, the women started trickling back into the bar, and it was announced that it was our turn.

Here’s the experience as I wrote about it then:

“The men head down several flights of stairs to what can only be described as a party room — chairs, tables, a wet bar and a dauntingly open space for taking your clothes off, which we do. Next thing you know, I'm sitting in a sauna filled with Finns and rival technology journalists, whom I will never think of in quite the same way again.”

This, as you might have deduced, was when I was naked with Linus Torvalds’ father. Nils hung out nearby and we continued to chat. He handed me birch branches and told me I should flail myself with them. I did not.

I don’t know how long we stayed in the sauna. I know I wasn’t leaving until the Finns did, and I held out. Then we showered, got dressed, and went back to the bar for one last cocktail – always a brilliant thing to do when dehydrated.

Certainly it was one of my more memorable experiences covering technology, and I got a funny column out of it. I never did meet Linus Torvalds, who is still overseeing the Linux community and lately has done things like kick out Russian programmers because of that nation’s war in Ukraine, and offer to build a guitar pedal for a random Linux developer. Linux, by the way, is today on one of the most prominent general-purpose operating systems in the world. Even the Android smartphone OS is based on it.

And Nils? I lost touch with him. Wish I hadn’t. Fascinating guy. Now 79, he got into politics and in 2008 was elected to Helsinki’s city council. In 2012, Nils was installed in the European Parliament, of which he is still a member.

Perhaps someday he and I will schvitz again.

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Here is the full column as it appeared on October 28, 2003. Unusually, it’s available online.