Also known as: Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds (born 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who created the Linux kernel — the core of an operating system now running on everything from supercomputers to phones — and later the Git version-control system.¹

Life and work

In 1991, as a student in Helsinki, Torvalds announced a free Unix-like kernel he was writing “just as a hobby.” Released under an open licence, Linux drew contributors worldwide and grew into a full operating system that today powers most servers, Android phones, and embedded devices.¹ In 2005 he wrote Git to manage the kernel’s own development, and it became the dominant tool for tracking source code.¹ He continues to coordinate Linux kernel development.

Why they matter

Linux is the operating system that ties hardware to software across the computing world: it schedules the CPU, manages memory, and drives devices on countless machines. A capture node sitting by an antenna — say a small board running a decoder like GopherTrunk — almost certainly runs Linux, and its source lives in a Git repository descended from Torvalds’ tools.¹

Legacy

Linux and Git underpin a large share of the internet and of open-source software, making Torvalds one of the most influential figures in modern computing infrastructure.

Sources

1. Linus Torvalds — Wikipedia, for biography, Linux, and Git. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

See also

• Operating system
• Version control
• Central processing unit (CPU)
• Computer hardware