“Linuxcare, Inc. (www.linuxcare.com), the first company to
provide a complete solution for Linux technical support to Fortune
1000 companies, announced today Linus Torvalds’ historic landslide
election victory as the next leader of the Free World. Torvalds won
73% of the votes, giving him a huge win over candidates Bill Gates
(9%), George W. Bush, Jr. (6%), Bill Bradley (5%), Al Gore (4%),
and Dan Quayle (4%). The announcement of the winner appears in a
full page ad in today’s Northern California Edition of the Wall
Street Journal.
The election results are notable for several reasons. In a trial
run of “direct democracy,” votes were submitted electronically via
the World Wide Web at www.linuxcare.com. This bypassed the
Electoral College system currently used to elect U.S. Presidents.
Many question the role of indirect democracy in an age when the
majority of the population is on-line. The election was also
remarkable for the fact that the techies, notably Bill Gates,
Chairman of the world’s largest software company, and Linus
Torvalds, founder of the world’s largest software movement,
trounced their inside-the-beltway competition. Whether this
portends a power-shift from backrooms to chatrooms is too early to
foretell.
Most remarkably, this is the first time a foreign-born citizen
has been elected to the land’s highest office. Torvalds — not yet
30 — is a native of Finland, a large country in northern Europe
that straddles the Arctic Circle. Before his landslide election
victory, Torvalds was best known for inventing Linux, the Open
Source computer operating system that now claims more than 12
million adherents, a much larger group than the entire population
of his native land.
Torvalds, who was born, raised, and educated in Helsinki,
Finland, currently lives in Santa Clara, Calif. with his wife and
two daughters. Whether or not he’s interested in moving his young
family into the White House is not certain. However, if he does, it
is likely that he’ll want a T-3 in the Oval Office. “