Yeah I was a bit puzzled by nix's comment, assuming, without any real knowledge, that the Economist did its normal 'Mr. Torvalds' on second reference. Which your link would seem to bear out.
There is, after all, more than one 'Linus' working on the kernel. So far, I haven't run into a problem with folks sharing the same last name in a particular article, but first names do collide from time to time.
Posted May 15, 2009 18:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
My memory is failing, it seems: that link was pretty persuasive.
(I'm surprised the kernel hasn't run into the Rasmussen/Smith problem yet:
in my experience family names are a *lot* more limited in supply than
personal names. This is especially notable in China.)