NY Times: The Rebel Code

Thanks to Tom Bylander
for this link.

“One recent rainy afternoon at the home of Marcus Meissner in
Erlangen, Germany, Meissner’s computer froze.”

“Meissner sent out an e-mail. Moments later in Budapest, a
26-year-old called Mingo — it is the habit of the wizards who tend
to Linux to refer to one another by only their e-mail avatars —
posted a fix. Gabriel, a radio astronomer in southern Spain,
countered the next day with a different version. Then Petkan, a
system administrator at a Bulgarian newspaper, weighed in with a
new approach. The point was not simply to mend the program, but
also to find the most elegant way of doing so. Of course everyone
knew that Torvalds, the California-based spider at the center of
this self-spinning web, would have the final say.”

Complete story. (Site registration required.)