Wasn't Torvalds already working abroad by the time Linux became a major phenomenon (as opposed to a hacker's curiosity)?

It depends where you want to set the goalposts for a major phenomenon. Linus moved to the US in 1997 to work for Transmeta, while Linux hit 1.0 in 1994, and Red Hat got its start in 1993. The dot com boom was in full swing in 1999 when Red Hat went public. The rise of Linux really does parallel the rise of the public internet, which first became public in 1994.

And SSH and IRC.

Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that

Linus seems to disagree:

Question: You were born in Finland, but your mother tongue is Swedish. Do you call yourself a Finn, or a Swede? What is it like to be a Swede in Finland?

Torvalds: Oh, I’m a Finn, definitely. When Finland beats Sweden in ice hockey, it’s a national holiday, and Swedish-speaking Finns are celebrating. I only speak Swedish; there are no ties to the country of Sweden. And don’t say “Swede in Finland,” it’s really “Swedish-speaking Finn” (“finlandssvensk” in Swedish, “suomenruotsalainen” in Finnish).

https://www.linux.com/news/interview-linus-without-linux/

His mother tongue is Swedish, but he is (or at least was) a Finn. Finland is a bilingual country. Well, if you don't count the Sami. If you do, you get more languages.

> His mother tongue is Swedish

Which is the definition of being an ethnic Swede. He's part of the relatively small Swedish minority in Finland. I was never contesting his Finnish nationality.

Most Fennoswedic families moved ~400 years ago from Sweden to Finland. According to that logic, Americans would actually be native Britons? Sounds wrong to me.

The Finnish context and the American one aren’t really comparable. The USA is an 18th-century project where there was little emphasis on ethnicity. Modern Finland, on the other hand, is the project of 19th- and early 20th-century nationalism where the independent nation would be a home for specifically the ethnic Finnish people, while still providing rights and recognition for the ethnic Swedes (and, by the late 20th century, for the Saami). Complicating matters still further, some of the ideologues of an independent Finland for Finns, were ethnic Swedes who "switched sides", as it were.

wassenaar10’s two posts above are quite reasonable and on-topic, though I can understand how they might sound odd or offensive to people unfamiliar with Finland.

Culturally Swedish speaking Finns are much closer to Finns than to Swedes, 90% of the time. Add to the fact that a majority of them are fluently bilingual, and I'd call it somewhat of a stretch to characterize them as "ethnic Swedes". Source: live in Finland, speak both languages.

There’s a big difference, though, between Finland Swedes from Uusimaa who are well on the way to total assimilation, and e.g. those from Nykarleby whose contact with the Finnish language is limited and who still look to Stockholm in certain ways.

Yeah, that's definitely true. Iirc Torvalds belongs to the former, though.

I am pretty sure that "Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that" was destined to sound offensive also to a fair number of people familiar with Finland, and that this was a predictable result. You also in passing manage to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state while revealing a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history. Please join wassenaar10 in resisting the impulse to visit your parochial resentments upon us and most certainly do not do so while appealing for tolerance under the banner of our 'unfamiliarity' with Finland. We are familiar enough with trolls and do not need to know any more than that.

> cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state

I don't know where you got that from. Finland is no less legitimate than all the other European countries whose independence movements arose in the 19th century, like Poland or those which emerged from Austro-Hungary. Finland is a fairly typical European nation-state.

> a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history.

Ethnicity did not play the same role in the American War of Independence as it did in the 19th-century European independence movements, for the simple reason that that new notion of ethnicity did not arise until the age of Romanticism and the years immediately preceding 1848.

> your parochial resentments

I don’t share the resentments to which wassenaar10 may allude. I am not saying that he is correct, only that his view is one that exists in the Finnish context.

> We are familiar enough with trolls

"Troll" has a very specific meaning in internet parlance and is not merely anyone that you think is wrong.

Linus perfectly embodies the Finnish spirit.

http://staefcraeft.blogspot.com/2013/07/linus-torvalds-there...

Finnish sauna is better than Swedish sauna.