Linus Benedict Torvalds (; born December 28, 1969 in
Helsinki,
Finland) is a
Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the
Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator.
Biography
Early years
Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and
Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet
Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the
University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the
Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after
Linus Pauling, the American
Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for
Linus the
Peanuts cartoon character," noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".
Torvalds attended the
University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in
computer science from NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the
Finnish Army, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the
mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he held the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of fire controller, calculating positions of guns, targets, and trajectories, finally telling the guns where to shoot. In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to
UNIX for the first time, in the form of a
DEC MicroVAX running
ULTRIX. His M.Sc. thesis was titled
Linux: A Portable Operating System.
His interest in computers began with a
Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a
Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an
assembly language and a
text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a
Pac-Man clone named
Cool Man. On
January 2,
1991 he purchased an
Intel 80386-based
IBM PC and spent a month playing the game
Prince of Persia before receiving his
MINIX copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.
Later years
Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (
née Monni) — a six-time Finnish national
karate champion — whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Torvalds was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendants to send him an
e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.
Tove and Linus were later married and have three daughters, Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste.
After a visit to
Transmeta in late 1996,
he accepted a position at the company in California, where he would work from February 1997 through 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. In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to
Portland, Oregon to be closer to the OSDL's
Beaverton, Oregon-based headquarters.
From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in
86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and
Unix.
Red Hat and
VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with
stock options in gratitude for his creation. In 1999, both companies
went public and Torvalds'
net worth shot up to roughly $20 million.
His personal mascot is a
penguin nicknamed
Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of the Linux kernel.
Although Torvalds believes that "
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 has been criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary
BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel. However, Torvalds has since written a free-software replacement for BitKeeper called
Git. Torvalds has commented on official
GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of
desktop environments, he encourages users to switch to
KDE. However, Torvalds thought
KDE 4.0 was a "disaster" because of its lack of maturity, so he temporarily switched to
GNOME.
The Linus/Linux connection
Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed
Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend
Ari Lemmke, who administered the
FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds' directory
linux.
Authority on Linux
About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself.
Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
[Henrik Ingo. Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. Ingram, 2005. 42-45. ]Linux trademark
Torvalds owns the "Linux"
trademark, and monitors use of it chiefly through the
Linux Mark Institute.
Recognition
- In 1997 he received his Master degree (Laudatur Grade) from Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.
- The 1999 novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson features several characters who use "Finux", a Unix-like operating system developed in Finland.
- In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by the Time magazine article by Lawrence Lessig
- In the search for the 100 Greatest Finns of all time, voted in the summer of 2004, Torvalds placed 16th.
- In 2005 he appeared as one of "the best managers" in a survey by BusinessWeek.
- In 2006, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of "10 people who don't matter" because the growth of Linux has shrunk Torvalds' individual impact.
- In 2006, Time Magazine—Europe Edition named him one of the revolutionary heroes of the past 60 years.
See also
