Maybe you didn't exactly invent an operating system. But other than that, Linus Torvalds is just like you! The open-source movement's favorite Finn has gotten into the blogging game, just like every other Tom, Dick, and Sergey. Unlike the Google founder, whose site blatantly promotes 23andMe, his wife Anne Wojcicki's gene-testing startup, Torvalds just wants to share news and pictures of his family. On the blog, he geeks out over Intel flash-memory disks and even shares a custom script to limit Internet usage for his kids. But like any good long-term resident alien with a green card, Torvalds laments the most about American politics, pointing out the fundamental problem with voting:

We hear that some Yahoo executives charged with developer relations, in their eagerness to reach more programmers and have them hook their software into Yahoo services, have been talking to source-code repository GitHub about an acquisition. GitHub's intended audience, programmer Ted Dziuba explains, is "people who spray their shorts over Git because it was invented by Linus Torvalds," the inventor of Linux; it's an alternative to Subversion, a tool for managing software's source code. But this move to fold a community of Torvalds fanboys into Yahoo has been stalled by the recent unpleasantness with Carl Icahn. All acquisitions are on hold until the next board meeting, champions of a GitHub acquisition have been told. Just as well; this deal sounds like a nonstarter, which should be killed for reasons beyond testy shareholders. Yahoo has enough gits as it is.

Twitter, the 140-characters at a time blogging service, was shaped by its founder's dry, understated sense of humor. The company, not to mention the service, seems to be a sort of Silicon Valley inside joke that, improbably, Ev Williams and his fellow Twitterers have managed to play on the rest of the world. For this, Sarah Lacy labels Williams a "nontrepreneur." Fittingly, Sarah Lacy gave his microcompany got a mere four pages in her new book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good:

Sarah Meyers asks the key question that was on everyone's mind at this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco: Has the open-source operating system gotten anyone laid, ever? The consensus: No. SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese admits to knowing Linux creator Linus Torvalds and insufferable free-software gadfly Richard Stallman, but making out with them? "I'm definitely not going to continue this interview. This is not a serious business interview, is it?" We always knew you were a smart cookie, Kim!

In this undated photo, uploaded to a Russian pic-sharing site back in December, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shows off his pecs in a Speedo. We're betting it's at least a couple years old, though. Lately, Torvalds has been bearing an increasing resemblance to the Linux icon, Tux the Penguin. Add this to our collection of embarrassing geek photos. (Photo from m0sia.ru)

Linux creator Linus Torvalds vs. lush-locked Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. "What I'm trying to do here is wake people up who seem to be living in some dream-world where Sun wants to help people." [crn.com]

Google's new infrastructure, now rolling out, is named Bigdaddy. No comment needed. [Matt Cutts]
Bubble's back, babe. [Techdirt]
CBS proves its loyalty to Google Video. [LA Times]
Okay, so Robert Scoble was the "big-name blogger" who wanted his evil back — turns out he even blogged it. The pain of discovering this scoop's old age was mollified by the discovery of Google: Evil or Not? [EvilorNot]
Linus Torvalds joins the "Sliding Scale of Evil" movement [CNet]