Father of the Linux OS

A chat with Tovaris-
Linus Torvalds, an acknowledged godfather of the open-source movement, was just 21 when he changed the world by writing Linux

Today, 17 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones. In fact ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google, Facebook, PHP, Apache, or MySQL?

“
I don't personally think we'd have
gotten anywhere without all those
wild-and-wacky distributions. I'd
rather have a bit of spirited
discussion and even infighting
than a staid landscape with a
single vendor
”

Linus is the son of the journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, He was attracted to computers from an early age and attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to study Computer Science. In 1991, he purchased a PC. As the computers at the university were Unix-based, he bought a copy of Andrew Tanenbaum’s MINIX operating system. He was dissatisfied with it, and set about writing his own Unix clone from scratch, unaware of the enormity of the task.. After four months work, in his bedroom in his mother’s apartment, he announced, in the MINIX newsgroup comp.os.minix …

“I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.”

Torvalds called it Linux (short for Linus' MINIX). He took a break from his studies to work full-time on the project. By the end of October he was able to announce, ‘It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable’, and released Linux under the GPL (GNU General Public License). It soon became the focus of the largest collaborative ‘open source’ project ever undertaken, including geek superstars Fred van Kempen and Alan Cox.. Linus led the development work, not just by his technical brilliance, but by his engaging and genial personality.

Linus went on to spend a total of ten years at Helsinki University, as student, researcher and instructor. His M.Sc. thesis was titled 'Linux: A Portable Operating System'

From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open, helping to

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