Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systemssuch as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition...
NationalityFinnish
ProfessionEngineer
Date of Birth28 December 1969
CityHelsinki, Finland
CountryFinland
Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.
If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.
The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.
I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.
I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.
Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.
No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.
The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.
I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.
People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.