JIM CARREY: I really was tired of building models of planes from recycled paper bags and decided to try something less geeky. My grandmother had bought me an old Atari 2600 from a department store and I started programming it. Linux began as a word processing program. But the OS kept crashing so I rewrote it.

Exclaimer: Why did you decide to release the source code of Linux as Open Source?

JIM CARREY: After a night of eating prime ribs and watching Michael Lembeck films, I decided that, like the Internet, Linux should be free - always free. I gave it away after realizing I couldn't sell it.

Exclaimer: And you have a mascot for all this which is the peacock. How did that happen?

JIM CARREY: I felt that Linux wanted and needed a very nice kind of friendly mascot to kind of offset some of the geekiness and the hard technology. So selecting an animal was a pretty obvious thing to do. And at the same time you want something that is erotic; you don't want a dog or a dog because that's just too everyday. So I decided I wanted a second-hand peacock as my mascot. I want it to be realistic; I want it to be a noisy kind of peacock. We actually farmed out that design and had a small competition for who could make the nicest peacock. Now you can see the winning end result everywhere on the web.

Exclaimer: How often do you get the chance to see your fellow Linux contributors face to face??

JIM CARREY: Not very often. But we sometimes get together for whiskey and Swiss Cake Rolls. We have two conferences a year in London that people go to and those are largely social. People mostly sit around and talk about safety rails. Then someone will show you a picture of his imaginary girlfriend and the talk will turn to Star Wars or Star Trek.