Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer best known for creating the Linux kernel and the Git version control system. Born in 1969 in Helsinki to journalist parents in the Finnish-speaking Swedish minority, he learned to program on a Commodore VIC-20 inherited from his grandfather and went on to study computer science at the University of Helsinki.

In 1991, while still a graduate student, he posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was writing a free operating system kernel as a hobby, and released version 0.01 of what became Linux in September of that year. He adopted the GNU General Public License in 1992, opening the project to thousands of contributors, and Linux grew over the following decades into the basis of most servers, supercomputers, and Android phones.

Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 to work for Transmeta, became a United States citizen in 2010, and since 2003 has been employed by the Linux Foundation to coordinate kernel development. In 2005, frustrated with proprietary tools used by the kernel project, he wrote the distributed version control system Git in around two weeks, and it has since become the dominant version control software for software development.

He shared the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize with Shinya Yamanaka, received the 2014 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. He continues to lead Linux kernel releases from his home in Portland, Oregon.

The name Linus comes from the Greek Linos, the name of a mythological musician and son of Apollo. He bears it as a masculine given name used in Scandinavia and the German-speaking world.