Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds (born December 28, 1969, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish computer scientist who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux operating system.

At age 10 Torvalds began to dabble in computer programming on his grandfather’s Commodore VIC-20. In 1991 while a computer science student at the University of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), he purchased his first personal computer (PC). He was not satisfied, however, with the computer’s operating system (OS). His PC used MS-DOS (the disk operating system from Microsoft), but Torvalds preferred the UNIX operating system he had used on the university’s computers. Consequently, he decided to create his own PC-based version of UNIX.

Months of determined programming work yielded the beginnings of an operating system known as Linux. In 1991 Torvalds posted a message on the Internet to alert other PC users to his new system, made the software available as a free download, and, as was a common practice among software developers at the time, released the source code, which meant that anyone with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own purposes. Because of their access to the source code, many programmers helped Torvalds retool and refine the software, and by 1994 Linux kernel (original code) version 1.0 had been released.

Although Torvalds purposely made Linux open source, he would send abusive emails to those who made changes he disagreed with. Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University, stated in a 2018 interview in The New Yorker that the emails may have contributed to the male-dominated Linux development community, as women may have found receiving the insulting messages to be more isolating than men may have found them. In 2018 Torvalds announced in a post to a Linux mailing list that he would step down as lead developer at Linux “to get help on how to behave differently.” He admitted that he had never been a “people person.”

Operating Linux required a certain amount of technical acumen; it was not as easy to use as more popular operating systems, such as Windows, Apple’s Mac OS, or IBM OS/2. However, Linux evolved into a remarkably reliable, efficient system that rarely crashed. Linux became popular in the late 1990s when competitors of Microsoft began taking the upstart OS seriously. Netscape Communications, Corel, Oracle, Intel, and other companies announced plans to support Linux as an inexpensive alternative to Windows. In addition to Linux being free, its source code can be viewed and freely modified by anyone, unlike in a proprietary OS. This means that different language versions can be developed and deployed in markets that would be too small for the traditional companies. Also, many organizations and governments have expressed security reservations about using any kind of computer software containing code that cannot be viewed.

Combined with Apache, an open-source Web server, Linux accounts for most of the servers used on the Internet. Because it is open source, and thus modifiable for different uses, Linux is popular for systems as diverse as cell phones and supercomputers. Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, has at its core a modified Linux kernel, and Chrome OS, Google’s operating system, which uses the Chrome browser, is also Linux-based. The addition of user-friendly desktop environments, office suites, browsers, and even games helped to increase Linux’s popularity and make it more suitable for home and office desktops.

In 1997 Torvalds took a position with Transmeta, a microprocessor manufacturer, and relocated to California. Six years later he left the company to work as a project coordinator under the auspices of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium created by such high-tech companies as IBM, Intel, and Siemens to promote Linux development. In 2007 OSDL merged with the Free Standards Group to form the Linux Foundation. In 2012 Torvalds was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize by the foundation Technology Academy Finland.