Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of Linux. He now acts as the project's coordinator (or Benevolent Dictator for Life).

Linus was inspired by Minix (a kernel and operating system developed by Andrew Tanenbaum) to develop a capable UNIX-like operating system that could be run on a PC. Linux now also runs on many other architectures.

Biography

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, as the son of journalists Anna and Nils, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 5.5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although he prefers to claim he was named after Linus in the Peanuts comic strip. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His father was a Communist who in the mid-1970s spent a year studying in Moscow.

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. He wrote his M.Sc. thesis, titled Linux: A Portable Operating System, on Linux.

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 assembler 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. In 1990 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a few weeks playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his Minix copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.

Linus is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni). She is a six-time Finnish national Karate champion, whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Linus 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. They have three daughters, Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20 2000), and a cat named Randi (short for Mithrandir, the Sindarin name for Gandalf, a wizard in The Lord of the Rings).

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 ^*.

Torvalds moved to San Jose, California and lived there for several years with his family. In June of 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to Linus's place of work.

He worked for Transmeta Corporation from February 1997 until June 2003, and is now seconded to the Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Oregon based software consortium.

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

Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Torvalds but coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief.

Unlike many open source evangelists, Torvalds keeps a low profile and generally refuses to comment on competing software products. He has been criticized for his neutrality by the GNU Project, specifically for having worked on proprietary software with Transmeta and for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software (for version control in the Linux kernel, BitKeeper was replaced by git in June, 2005). Torvalds has commented on official GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of window managers, he encourages his users to switch to KDE ^*. Despite his neutral nature, Torvalds has vehemently defended open-source and free software against what he perceives as slander or lip service by proprietary software vendors.

However, he has shown support of proprietary interests when free software ideology clashes with his personal sense of pragmatism. For example, during the BitKeeper saga, Torvalds engaged in personal attack against Andrew Tridgell, who had attempted to reverse engineer BitKeeper's protocol at the time. During an interview with Forbes Linus's opinion on GPL3 was interpreted as supporting the use of digital rights management[http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/marcus/weblog/linus_got_it_wrong_on_drm.

The Linus/Linux connection

Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced with his own OS, Linux. He first named it 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 Linux kernel was first hosted for downloading, gave Torvalds a directory called linux. In August of 1991, Linus publicized ^* his creation on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix.

Only about 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself. Despite the relative size of his contribution, Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel. Torvalds generally stays out of non-kernel-related debates. The Linux kernel, when combined with software developed by many others (mainly the GNU system) results in a so-called Linux distribution. Most people refer to this combination as just Linux. However some, including Richard Stallman, refer to it as "GNU/Linux." Torvalds maintains that the name "GNU/Linux" is only justified if you make a GNU-based distribution.

Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors ^* use (or abuse) of it chiefly through the non-profit organization Linux International. Linux's wide and passionate userbase make trademark abuse difficult as it is rapidly detected.

Recognition

Many Linux fans tend to worship Torvalds as a kind of god. In his book "Just for Fun" he complains that he finds it annoying.

In 1996 Asteroid 9793 Torvalds was named after Linus Torvalds.
In 1998 he received the EFF Pioneer Award.^*
In 1999 he recived honorary doctor status at Stockholm University.
In Time Magazine's Person of the Century Poll, Torvalds was voted at #17 at the poll's close in 2000. ^*
In 2001, he shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura.
The 2001 film Swordfish contains a Finnish character - the number one computer hacker in the world - named Axl Torvalds.
In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by TIME.
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". ^*

References

External links

}}

Interviews

Humor

The Microsoft Memo

Documentaries

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Linus Torvalds