Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel as a student project and it now runs most of the internet. Born in Helsinki in 1969 into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family of journalists — his grandfather was a poet and a statistician who let him type programs into a Commodore VIC-20 — he studied computer science at the University of Helsinki. He bought a personal computer in 1991 and was frustrated that the Unix systems he wanted to learn on were expensive and proprietary, while Minix, a teaching system, was deliberately limited and its author would not accept substantial changes. In August 1991 he posted to a Usenet newsgroup saying he was doing a free operating system, just a hobby, nothing big and professional like GNU, and asking what people wanted. He released version 0.01 the following month. Two decisions made it what it became. He licensed it under the GNU General Public License, which requires anyone distributing modifications to release the source, so that improvements return to the common pool. And he accepted contributions from anyone, releasing very frequently — release early, release often — so that thousands of people could test and fix in parallel. Combined with the GNU project's tools, it produced a complete free operating system, and the argument over whether it should be called GNU/Linux has run for thirty years. Linux now runs the majority of web servers, all of the top supercomputers, and Android. He also wrote Git in 2005 in about two weeks after the version control system the kernel used withdrew its free licence. He is known for blunt and sometimes abusive review comments, and apologised for it in 2018.
- Lived: 1969 CE – ?
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: software_engineer, inventor
