Biography
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, as the son of Anna and Nils, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 6%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His father was a Communist who in the mid-1970s spent a year studying in Moscow.
Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. He wrote his M.Sc. thesis, titled Linux: A Portable Operating System, on Linux.
His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembler and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac Man clone named Cool Man. In 1990 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a few weeks playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his Minix copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.
Linus is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni). She is a six-time Finnish national Karate champion, whom he first met in fall 1993. Linus 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. They have three daughters, Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20, 2000), and a cat named Randi (short for Mithrandir, the Elvish name for Gandalf, a wizard in The Lord of the Rings).
Torvalds moved to San Jose, California and lived there for several years with his family. In June of 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon. Finally, they moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to Linus' place of work.
He worked for Transmeta Corporation from February 1997 until June 2003, and is now seconded to the Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Oregon based software consortium.His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of Linux.
Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Torvalds but coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief.
Unlike many open source "evangelists", Torvalds keeps a low profile and generally refuses to comment on competing software products. He has been criticized for his neutrality by the GNU Project, specifically for having worked on proprietary software with Transmeta and for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software. Despite his neutral nature, Torvalds has vehemently defended open-source and free software against what he perceives as slander or lip service by proprietary software vendors.
The Linus/Linux connection
Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced with his own OS, Linux (Linus's Minix). However, Torvalds thought the name "Linux" was too egotistical and planned to rename it Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate a Unix-like system). But, before the name was changed, his friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Torvalds to upload Linux to a network so it could be easily downloaded. Ari, however, not happy with the Freax name, gave Torvalds a directory called linux on his FTP server.
In August of 1991, he publicized [1] his creation on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix.
Only about 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself. Despite the relative size of his contribution, Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel. Torvalds generally stays out of non-kernel-related debates. The Linux kernel, when combined with software developed by many others, (mainly the GNU system) results in a so-called Linux distribution. Most people refer to this combination as just Linux. However some, including Richard Stallman, refer to it as "GNU/Linux." Torvalds maintains that the name "GNU/Linux" is only justified if you make a GNU-based distribution.
Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors [2] use (or abuse) of it chiefly through the non-profit organization Linux International. Linux's wide and passionate userbase make trademark abuse difficult as it is rapidly detected.
Recognition
Many Linux fans tend to worship Torvalds as a kind of god. In his book "Just for Fun" he complains that he finds it annoying.
In 1996 Asteroid 9793 Torvalds was named after Linus Torvalds.
In Time Magazine's Person of the Century Poll, Torvalds was voted at #17 at the poll's close in 2000. [3]
In 2001, he shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura.
In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by TIME.
In the search for the 100 Greatest Finns of all time, voted in the summer of 2004, Torvalds placed 16th.
In 2005 he appeared as one of "the best managers" in a survey by BusinessWeek. [4]
Linus Torvalds
Some comments of Linus Bendict Torvalds
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." (1991)
Notes: This was the launch of Linux.
"I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves 'why?'. Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix." (1991)
Notes: The Hurd 0.0 was released in August 1996.
"Dijkstra probably hates me." (1991?)
"Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"
Notes: Announcing one of the first versions of Linux.
"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix." (1992)
Notes: to Andrew Tanenbaum (author of Minix).
"Hello, this is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as /linəks/." (1994)
"If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." (1995)
"You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now." (1995)
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program." (1995)
"The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea." (17 Oct 1996)
"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had." (1996)
Notes: Comment made about people who did not like Linux's mascot, Tux.
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" (1996)
"[...] the Linux philosophy is 'laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong one. 'Do it yourself'. That's it." (1996)
"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)" (1996)
"My name is Linus, and I am your god." (1998)
"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs." (1992)
"When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*"." (1995)
"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children." (1995?)
"If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." (1996)
"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well." (2000)
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." (2000)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." (2001)
"I allege that SCO is full of it." (2003)
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." (2003)
"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce." (2003)
"I was an ugly child."
"There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong." (2004)
"Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus." (2004)
Notes: In response to Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's claim that Linus Torvalds is not the real father of Linux.
""regression testing"? What's that? If it compiles, it is good, if it boots up it is perfect." (1998)
"Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is "right" or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law." (2004)
"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project. " (2004)
"The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease." (2004)
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's _my_ choice, dammit." (October 26, 2004)
"A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die." (February 1, 2005)
·
2.6.: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).
2..x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)
.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely _everything_, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").
I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination.
Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)
"It was _such_ a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful." (April 14, 2005)
"I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual." (July 14, 2005)
When asked why he called the new software, "git," British slang meaning "a rotten person," he said. 'I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.'"
"The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at _any_ point pretty damn ugly. " (July 31, 2005)
"Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did." (1997)
"If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it." (2005)
"I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants."
Attributed
"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free."
"I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do."
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds."
Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amsterdam Linux Symposium
"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system."
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