Linus Benedict Torvalds (; born December 28, 1969 ) is a Finnish American software engineer and hacker, who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel.

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland.

Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning American 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 ".

However, Torvalds thought KDE Plasma Desktop 4. 0 was a " disaster " because of its lack of maturity, so he switched to GNOME.

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.

As of 2006, approximately two percent of the Linux kernel was written by Torvalds himself.

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.

On April 23, 2012 at Internet Society's Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Torvalds was one of the inaugural inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame, one of ten in the Innovators category and thirty-three overall inductees.

On April 20, 2012, Torvalds was declared one of two winners of that year's Millennium Technology Prize, together with Shinya Yamanaka for what is widely described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the technology field.

In 2010, as part of a series called The Britannica Guide to the World's Most Influential People, Torvalds was listed among The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time ( ISBN 9781615300037 ).

In 1996, an asteroid ( 9793 Torvalds ) was named after him.

Linus Torvalds, the original creator of Linux ( a popular operating system kernel ), was once pecked by a Little Penguin while on holiday in Australia.

This was famously disapproved of by Tanenbaum in the Tanenbaum – Torvalds debate.

In 1998, McConnell was named as one of the three most influential people in the software industry by Software Development Magazine, along with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds.

Under Anderson, Wired has produced some widely noted articles, including the April 2003 " Welcome to the Hydrogen Economy " story, the November 2003 " Open Source Everywhere " issue ( which put Linus Torvalds on the cover and articulated the idea that the open source method was taking off outside of software, including encyclopedias as evidenced by Wikipedia ), the February 2004 " Kiss Your Cubicle Goodbye " issue ( which presented the outsourcing issue from both American and Indian perspectives ), and an October 2004 article by Chris Anderson, which coined the popular term " Long Tail.

In 2007 Torvalds was elected to the post of the third vice chairperson of the Swedish People's Party.

Torvalds was a candidate for European Parliament election in 2009 on the Swedish People's Party list.

Ole Torvalds ( 4 August 1916, Ekenäs – 8 February 1995 ) was a Finnish-Swedish journalist and poet from Finland.

He was the father of Nils Torvalds and grandfather of Linus Torvalds.

Other notable individuals are author Jean M. Auel, historian Max Dimont, politician Emil Hurja, guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, U. S. Communist Party leader Gus Hall ( originally Arvo Gustav Halberg ), mathematician Lars Ahlfors, musicians Dave Mustaine and Jaco Pastorius, computer scientists Linus Torvalds and Alfred Aho, co-founder of Apple Mike Markkula, astronaut Timothy L. Kopra, officer Larry Thorne, musician Einar Aaron Swan, ice hockey player Matt Niskanen and serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

Because of the commercial failure of the machine and lack of support, particularly in Finland, Torvalds became very used to having to write his own software rather than relying on programs written by others.

* In 1991, development of the free Linux kernel is started by Linus Torvalds in Finland.

Other claims to fame are the founding of the SANE Conferences organization and the fact that the NLUUG was the first organisation to have Linus Torvalds be a speaker on a conference outside Finland.

English has a rich technical vocabulary ( largely because native and non-native speakers alike use it to communicate technical ideas ) and many IT and technical professionals use English regardless of country of origin ( Linus Torvalds, for instance, comments his code in English, despite being from Finland and having Swedish as his first language ).

The book claims that Linus Torvalds used source code taken from Minix, a small Unix-like operating system used in teaching computer science, to create Linux 0. 01, on the theory that no mere student could write an entire Unix-like kernel single-handedly — although writing a kernel of similar size and capabilities is a standard part of many computer science degrees.

Samizdat claims that Linus Torvalds used source code taken from Minix, a small Unix-like operating system used in teaching computer science, to create Linux 0. 01, on the theory that no mere student could write an entire Unix-like kernel single-handedly.

* 1991 – Linus Torvalds announces the first version of what will become Linux.

Linus Torvalds on the other hand said in a 2007 mailing list post that as a matter of policy, the development team preferred more incremental changes.

Raymond also coined an aphorism he dubbed " Linus ' Law ", inspired by Linus Torvalds: " Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow ", that first appeared in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

The two most prominent people attached to the movement, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, may be seen as representatives of the value based versus apolitical philosophies, as well as the Gnu versus Linux coding styles.

( For example, " Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is considered by some to be a hacker.

Certainly major contributors to computer science such as Edsger Dijkstra and Donald Knuth, as well as the inventors of popular software such as Linus Torvalds ( Linux ), and Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson ( the C programming language ) are likely to be included in any such list ; see also List of programmers.

Himanen explained these ideas in a book, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, with a prologue contributed by Linus Torvalds and an epilogue by Manuel Castells.

Both Himanen and Torvalds were inspired by the Sampo in Finnish mythology.

Linus Torvalds releases his Linux soon afterwards.

He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds.

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

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

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

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 same year both companies went public and Torvalds ' share value temporarily shot up to roughly $ 20 million.

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.

However, Torvalds subsequently wrote 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 K Desktop Environment 3.