Linus Torvalds

His parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s.

His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland.

He was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize–winning American chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, he is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus The Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this made him "half Nobel Prize–winning chemist and half blanket-carrying cartoon character".

Linus Benedict Torvalds (, ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel.

He also created the distributed version control system Git.

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the 28th December 1969, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds, and the great-grandson of journalist and soldier Toivo Karanko.

His interest in computers began with a VIC-20 at the age of 11 in 1981.

He started programming for it in BASIC, then later by directly accessing the 6502 CPU in machine code (he did not utilize assembly language).

He then purchased a Sinclair QL, which he modified extensively, especially its operating system.

"Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland", he wrote his own assembler and editor "(in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries)" for the QL, and a few games.

He wrote a Pac-Man clone, Cool Man.

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group.

His Textbooks included: Programming the 80386 by John H. Crawford and Patrick P. Gelsinger, SYBEX, 1987 ISBN 0895883813 and The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach, Prentice-Hall, 1986 ISBN 0-13-201799-7.

His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Navy Nyland Brigade in the summer of 1989, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland.

He gained the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of an artillery observer.

He bought computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, in which Tanenbaum describes MINIX, an educational stripped-down version of Unix.

In 1990, Torvalds resumed his university studies, and was exposed to Unix for the first time in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX.

His MSc thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.

On 5 January 1991 he purchased an Intel 80386-based clone of IBM PC before receiving his MINIX copy, which in turn enabled him to begin work on Linux.

The first Linux prototypes were publicly released in late 1991.

Torvalds first encountered the GNU Project in fall of 1991 when another Swedish-speaking computer science student, Lars Wirzenius, took him to the University of Technology to listen to free software guru Richard Stallman's speech.

Torvalds would ultimately switch his original license (which forbade commercial use) to Stallman's GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) for his Linux kernel after complaints of distributors being unable to recoup their costs due to a non-commercial clause.

Version 1.0 was released on 14 March 1994.

After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996, Torvalds accepted a position at the company in California, where he worked from February 1997 to June 2003.

He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work.

From 1997 to 1999, he was involved in 86open, helping select the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.

In 1999, he was named by the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the world's top 100 innovators under age 35.

In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.

That year both companies went public and Torvalds's share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million.

His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the Linux kernel's mascot.

Although Torvalds believes "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software.

He was criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel.

He subsequently wrote a free-software replacement for it called Git.

In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Dunthorpe, Oregon to be closer to the OSDL's headquarters in Beaverton.

In 2008, Torvalds stated that he used the Fedora Linux distribution because it had fairly good support for the PowerPC processor architecture, which he favored at the time.

He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel."

He confirmed this in a 2012 interview.

Torvalds abandoned GNOME for a while after the release of GNOME 3.0, saying, "The developers have apparently decided that it's 'too complicated' to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do".

He then switched to Xfce.

He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award and the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award.