Linus Torvalds biography. How Linus Torvalds made development more free Linus Benedict Torvalds

"I make free software because I think it's the only correct way to develop"

Some people consider Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system and the Git repository, to be simply lucky. To some, on the contrary, he seems to be a purposeful enthusiast of his business. However, no one will argue that thanks to the exceptional talent of Torvalds, an operating system appeared that spread throughout the world.

Moreover, free use and free editing of the OS source code was fundamentally important for its creator. A huge opensource community has formed around Linux, thanks to which the system continues to develop to this day: new builds and new operating systems based on the Linux kernel are constantly appearing.

Linux distribution conditions were developed at an early stage. Linux is freely distributed and cannot be offered for sale. If the user made any changes or improvements to the system, he had to make them available to the public in the form of source codes.

Linus wrote his OS based on many tools freely distributed on the Internet. The most important of these was the GCC compiler, which was copyrighted under the General Public License. Subsequently, the entire Linux operating system was registered under the GPL license.

"Game" in Linux

Linus Torvalds did not think about fame, and did not even imagine that the story with Linux would go so far. He has been interested in computers and programming since his school years and continued to do what he loves while studying at the University of Helsinki. He himself often notes that programming should be enjoyed. Therefore, just like in childhood, he simply “played” with Linux development. Driven first by excitement and later by positive reviews, Torvalds suddenly discovered that he had created an operating system.

Linux 0.01

“Nobody actually produces great code the first time except me, but I’m the only one.”

Gradually, other developers began to “play” Linux along with its creator. By revealing all his cards and putting the source code of his brainchild in the public domain, Torvalds, to some extent, risked losing his status as the lead developer in the project. However, he apparently guessed that his professional level was significantly higher than most developers. In addition, not everyone knows how to work hard, efficiently and for free. And Linus Torvalds had just such a “unique” ability.

And the following quote illustrates the term “entertainment” as Torvalds conceived it:

So, most of you are likely to be incredibly bored this Christmas, and here's the perfect entertainment for you. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the shops will be closed and there won't really be anything better to do in between eating.

In general, before Linus married his student, programming was almost the only activity he did between “eating food.” After his marriage in 1996, Torvalds took a job at Transmeta, a California startup that developed energy-efficient CPUs. Still, he remained a leading Linux developer and continued to have fun doing it.

And in 2003, he left the company to focus entirely on developing his OS. Care became possible thanks to the newly formed public organization The Linux Foundation (at that time it was called Open Source Development Labs), which provided Torvalds with health insurance and a salary.

Unexpected success

The Linux community became a kind of self-regulating organism that was not centrally controlled by anyone. Accordingly, there was no point in organizing a power struggle in the project. However, Torvalds is still credited with informal leadership. According to famous quote, managing programmers is like herding a herd of cats. Perhaps Linus was able to find a balance between the general direction of the project's development and at the same time did not prevent the developers from walking on their own. Moreover, within of this project, any participant can conduct their own development based on the Linux kernel without interfering with anyone.

You can also remember that like attracts like: being an adequate and self-critical professional without an inflated PSV, Torvalds naturally“attracted” to himself those who had similar qualities. At some point, Linux became the most successful opensource project. And as you know, a team most often achieves serious success when its members look in approximately the same direction.

Such results could not leave commercial operating system manufacturers indifferent... and simply envious people left on the sidelines. However, Linus Torvalds did not seek to cross their path or make anyone jealous. Linux OS began to spread outside the community because it was a truly high-quality product. Particularly broad opportunities opened up for her when, in the spring of 1992, hacker Orest Zbrowski successfully adapted X Window for Linux. Thus, Linux had a graphical interface.

Git

Apart from developing operating systems, Torvalds was not interested in much else. Although this topic includes many aspects that you can study throughout your life. Linus considered the development of version control systems and working with databases to be the most boring areas. However, ironically, in 2005 he was forced to create his own source code control system.

In 2005, Torvalds released Linux 2.6.12-rc2 and stated that he would not continue development of the operating system until there was a replacement for the BitKeeper repository that the Linux community had used until 2005. BitKeeper had to be abandoned due to disagreements with its developers regarding its free use in opensource development. Toralds categorically did not like other source code control systems.

“As a result, I decided that I could write something better myself in two weeks, and I was not mistaken.”

Torvalds created the distributed source code control system Git in two weeks. He has said more than once that he hates centralized repositories like SVN. When creating Git, Linus had a clear idea of what he needed: decentralization, the possibility of independent offline development, convenience and reliability when branching and merging. Moreover, he created a source code control system specifically for the needs of Linux kernel developers.

But Git was destined for a “great” destiny, which Torvalds, again, did not expect. The repository has become popular outside the Linux community. Git was used by developers of such products as KVM, Qt, Drupal, Puppet, Wine.

Geek with character

In the wake of Git's popularity, Linus even gave a talk at Google in 2007. After reading the report, we can conclude that Torvalds treated himself and the current situation with a sufficient amount of irony and self-criticism:

I should caution you slightly that I'm not a very good speaker, partly because I don't like speaking, and partly because over the past few years everyone has wanted me to give talks on the dim future of Linux in the next century, and I don't really care. I'm a geek and prefer to talk about technology.

Even as a child, Linus Torvalds was a shy and unsociable person. At school he was considered a typical “nerd,” which was quite consistent with his appearance (skinny and short) and hobbies. He considered himself “ugly” - partly because of big nose.

In his youth, he continued to suffer from all sorts of complexes associated with socialization. True, he suffered exclusively in his free time from programming - that is, quite rarely.

His failures in society were more than compensated by his successes in computer science, where Torvalds enjoyed his own “omnipotence.” But such contradictions are characteristic of outstanding people and are compensated with age. In this case, you can trace the imprint this left on his manner of communication.

You can disagree with me all you want, but for the duration of this report, everyone who disagrees with me is, by definition, stupid assholes. Remember this! You will be free to do and think whatever you want when I finish my report. Now I'm telling you my only true opinion, so CVS users, if you really love it that much, get out of my sight. You need to go to a mental hospital or somewhere else.

The topic in which Torvalds feels confident becomes a field for improvisation, self-irony, coquetry and other forms of flirting with the public.

I started the project, developed the architecture and the initial code, and for the last year and a half it has been supported by a much nicer guy, the Japanese Junio Hamano, and he is the one who made Git more accessible to mere mortals. Early versions of Git did require a certain amount of "mental points" of brain power. Since then it has become much simpler.
In general, this is my usual approach - everyone else does their best, and I myself can just sit and sip a Pina Colada.

Linus Torvalds is no stranger to such qualities as frank frankness, bordering on demonstrative indecency. This is illustrated by the history of cooperation with NVidia in 2012.

One of the university students asked the creator of Linux to comment on the opensource community’s relationship with one of the world’s largest developers of graphics accelerators and processors, NVidia.

Linus Torvalds said that NVidia is one of the worst companies he has ever dealt with. According to him, NVidia representatives have absolutely no desire to cooperate with the Linux developer community and continue to keep the code of their graphics drivers for Linux closed.

Concluding his answer, Linus Torvalds summed up the above regarding NVidia, made an obscene hand gesture at the camera and declared: “NVidia, fuck you!”

The values that Linus Torvalds espoused (perhaps a little too ostentatiously at times) redefined what an open source community could be. His example inspired, and still continues to inspire, other developers to “deeds.”

On April 20, 2012, Linus Torvalds (together with Japanese physician Shinya Yamanaka) won the Millennium Technology Prize (Finland).

In 2014, Linus Torvalds received the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

Linus was born in Helsinki. The parents, Swedish-speaking Finns Nils and Anna Torvalds, were radical students in the 60s; their father was even a communist, who spent a year in Moscow in the mid-70s. Linus was named after Linus Pauling. At school he excelled in physics and mathematics. He was an unsociable, modest boy. He was often teased because political views his father.

In 1988, Linus entered the University of Helsinki, from which he graduated in 1996 with a master's degree in cybernetics.
Linus Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, with his wife Tove, six-time Finnish karate champion, three daughters: Patricia Miranda (b. December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (b. April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (b. November 20, 2000), as well as Randy the cat.

From February 1997 to June 2003, he worked at Transmeta Corporation, after which he moved to Open Source Development Labs. Although OSDL is based in Portland, Oregon, it operates from home in San Jose.
Linus Torvalds' personal mascot is the penguin Tux, which also became the emblem of the Linux OS.

Linus's Law, as finally formulated by Eric S. Raymond, states: "Given enough eyes, all mistakes lie on the surface." A deep bug is one that is hard to find, but if enough people look for the bugs, they all become shallow. Both programmers share an open source ideology, based in part on a belief in this law.

Unlike many open source ideologues, Torvalds rarely makes public comments about competing programs. He has been criticized for working on closed-source software at Transmeta and for using the closed-source BitKeeper application. However, he reacted sharply to attacks against Linux and open source ideology from software giants such as Microsoft and SCO.

In 1981, Leo, Linus' mathematician grandfather, introduced his grandson to the Commodore VIC-20 computer, which he used for mathematical calculations. Linus became interested in programming and read the manuals for the machine. He then began reading computer magazines and writing his own programs, first in BASIC and then in Assembly.
Since his school years, Linus received scholarships for his success in mathematics. The first computer he bought was a Sinclair QL, then costing almost $2,000.

After graduating from school, Linus entered the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The training was interrupted by a year of military service.
A significant event in Torvalds’ life was his reading of Andrew Tanenbaum’s book “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” (ISBN 0136386776). The book, using the Minix OS written by Tanenbaum as an example, presents the structure of UNIX family systems. Linus was very interested, and later bought a new computer based on a 386 processor, and installed Minix.

Having discovered flaws in the system, he began writing his own terminal emulator, in which he implemented task switching. Then Linus added more and more functions to the program, thanks to which it soon became a full-fledged operating system. He then sent the now famous announcement to the Minix newsgroup:
From: [email protected](Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: A small survey about my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everyone who uses minix - I'm making a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. It has been sculpted since April and will be ready soon. I want feedback on what people like/dislike about Minix, because my system is similar to it (same file system design (for practical reasons) among other things).

I've already enabled bash (1.08) and GCC (1.40) and everything seems to be working. This means that something useful will appear in a few months, and I would like to know what people want. Any advice is welcome, but I don’t promise that I will do everything :-)
Linus ( [email protected])
PS. Yes, it has no minix code, and multitasking fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching, etc.), and most likely will only support AT hard drives, because That is all I have:-(
On September 17, 1991, Linus released the source code of the program (version 0.01) for public download. The system immediately aroused great interest. Hundreds, then thousands of programmers became interested in the system (the directory with the program, in the absence best options, called “Linux”) and work on its improvement and addition. It was and is still distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License - GPL.

Minix author, prof. Andrew Tannenbaum unexpectedly came out with harsh criticism of the system's design:
“I still believe that creating a monolithic kernel in 1991 was a fundamental mistake. Be grateful that you are not my student: I would not give a high mark for such a design :-)” (from a letter to Linus Torvalds). Tannenbaum titled his post “Linux is useless.”

In addition to the monolithic kernel, Tannenbaum criticized Linux for its lack of portability. Tannenbaum predicted that 80x86 processors would disappear in the near future, giving way to RISC architecture.
The criticism hit Torvalds hard. Tannenbaum was a famous professor, and his opinion mattered. On this point, however, he was wrong. Linus Torvalds insisted that he was right.

The popularity of the system grew, and later journalists around the world started talking about it. Linux and Linus became famous.
Currently, only about 2% of the Linux system kernel is written by Torvalds himself, but it remains up to him to decide whether to change the official kernel code. Other parts of the Linux system (X Window System, GCC compiler, package management systems, etc.) are managed by other people. Torvalds generally does not participate in discussions not related to the system kernel.

Torvalds owns the Linux trademark and monitors its use (https://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/19/0828245.shtml) through the non-profit organization Linux International and with the help of Linux users around the world.

In Time magazine's 2000 "Man of the Century" poll, Linus was ranked 17th. In 2001, he shared with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura the Takeda Prize for contributions to social and economic prosperity. In 2004, Time included him in its list of the most influential people in the world.

Linus Benedict Torvalds- a world-famous Finnish programmer, a legend in the computer world, especially among programmers. He became famous for creating an operating system that revolutionized the computer industry and gave birth to a computer “religion.”

Torvalds' childhood

The famous programmer was born in the capital of Finland, Helsinki, on December 28, 1969, into a family of journalists. Was named after famous chemist- Linus Pauling, who was once awarded Nobel Prize. Linus's mother worked as a translator at a Finnish newspaper publishing house. His father was a communist, but after the mid-70s, his interests changed and he became a radio journalist. Torvalds' uncle worked in television, and his grandfather served as a newspaper editor-in-chief. His family was one of the small number of Finnish residents who spoke Swedish, and there were about 300 thousand of them out of 5 million who inhabited Finland.

Linus's father left him with his mother when he was still young, so the boy was raised by his mother and grandparents. Despite this, he had a happy childhood. Since the family mainly consisted of journalists, from childhood Torvalds was instilled with a passion for reading. However, he was less interested in journalism than in the computer that Leo Toernguys (Torvalds’ maternal grandfather) bought for himself in the mid-70s. It was one of the first computers at that time. It was called the Commodore Vic 20.

However, Linus soon became bored with standard computer programs and wanted to write something of his own. At first he decided to master BASIC, but soon the capabilities of this programming language were not enough for him and he decided to learn another, more Difficult language, but at the same time with great capabilities - Assembler. Linus learned quickly and was not distracted by anything. His father tried to instill in him an interest in girls, sports and many other things that Linus' peers were interested in. But all attempts were in vain. A few years later, Torvalds admitted in his book that, apart from mathematics and programming, he was not interested in anything else at that time, and besides, he simply did not want to understand other areas.

How Linux came to be

Linus saved money and dreamed of getting his own computer. In 1987, his dream came true and he purchased a Sinclair Ql - 32-bit Personal Computer, with a Motorola 68008 processor, clock speed of 7.5 MHz and 128 KB of RAM.

However, Linus was not happy with his purchase for long. Disappointment befell him as soon as he learned that it was impossible to reprogram the installed operating system. This required special equipment, which he did not have. At the age of 19, he began studying at the University of Helsinki, where his parents had previously studied. At the time of enrollment, his knowledge of programming was quite extensive, so he entered the computer science department. Linus began studying the C programming language in 1990 in classes at the university. This is the same language that he used to write the kernel of the Linux operating system.

In 1991, he replaces his old computer and buys a new one, more powerful for those times: Intel processor 386 clocked at 33 MHz and RAM by 4 MB.

But this computer also disappointed him, or rather its operating system - MS-DOS, which was supplied in the kit and used only half of the processor's capabilities. Therefore, Torvalds decides to replace the standard operating system with the one that is on the computers at the university - the UNIX operating system. And then he faces another problem: the cheapest UNIX with basic capabilities costs about five thousand dollars. He doesn't have that kind of money, so he decides to get a clone of UNIX, a small operating system called MINIX. The system was written for students studying UNIX. Its author was Andrew Tanenbaum, a specialist in the field of operating systems.

Even though MINIX was designed for Intel x86-based processors and was much more powerful than MS-DOS, it had many disadvantages. The system was paid (but not very expensive), the functionality was poor and, on top of everything else, half of the code was closed. Linus Torvalds could not come to terms with this and therefore decided to write his own operating system, something between UNIX and MINIX. It is unlikely that he then thought about how much time it would take him and certainly did not expect that his system would not only change him later life, but also the entire computer industry.

He decided to announce his intention at the MINIX conference. It was August 25, 1991. Here is his original message:

Original letter

Subject: What would you like to see in Minix?

(Small survey for my new operating system)

Hello to all Minix users -

I'm developing an operating system (free, just a hobby - not that big and

professional like GNU) for 386 (486) processors. I started back in April and now I already have

first results. I would like to get your opinion on what you like/dislike about Minix, since mine

the operating system is based on it in some ways (the same file system structure - but this is purely

practical reasons).

I have already ported bash (1.08), gcc (1.40) and everything seems to work fine. It follows that in

Over the next few months I will receive the first working version and therefore would like

know what people need most.

Any suggestions are welcome, but I can’t promise that I will implement them :)

Linus Torvalds [email protected]

Linus Quotes

Below is a list of the most famous Linus Torvalds quotes:

“Here I want to talk about my golden rules. First: Treat others the way you want them to treat you. By following this rule, you will know what to do in any situation. Second: be proud of what you do. Third: do everything with pleasure.”

“Anyone who reads this column will think that the increasing rigors of my role as chief hacker have turned me into a bastard. But this is not true. I've always been a bastard."

“I brought the girls home only when they wanted to work out. This didn’t happen very often, and I was never the initiator, but my father has illusions that they wanted to do more than just mathematics. (In his opinion, they still bought into the same formula: significant nose = significant man).”

“Programs are like sex: it’s better when it’s free.”

"Microsoft isn't evil, they just have really lousy operating systems."

"My name is Linus and I am your God."

“You see, not only do you have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you also have to be a smart-ass son of a bitch.”

Linux philosophy: “Laugh in the face of danger.” Oh. Not that. "Do it yourself". Yes, right.

“Some people have told me that they don't think the fat penguin fully represents the elegance of Linux. But in my opinion, an angry penguin has simply never rushed towards them at a speed of 200 km/h.”

“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, but still get it done.”

When you say, “I wrote a program that crashes Windows,” people just look at you blankly and answer: “Yes, I got such programs along with the system, for free.”

“I have no doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I seriously doubt is that it will ever have the impact that those involved in virtualization want."

“So, most of you are likely to be incredibly bored this Christmas, and here's the perfect entertainment for you. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the shops will be closed and there won't really be anything better to do in between eating."

, Hacker

Linus Benedict Torvalds, or Turvalds(Swede. Linus Benedict Torvalds[ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] (i) ; December 28, 1969, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish-American programmer and hacker.

Inspired by reading Andrew Tanenbaum's book on the Minix operating system, Linus created Linux - the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, which is based on this moment the most widely used free operating system.

From 1997 to 2003, Linus worked at Transmeta. After that, he organized Open Source Development Labs. Currently works at the Linux Foundation (since 2007), where he develops the Linux kernel.

Linus's parents, Finnish Swedes Nils and Anna Turvalds, were radical students in the 1960s; his father was a communist, who spent a year with Linus in Moscow in the mid-1970s. Linus was named after the American chemist Linus Pauling. At school he excelled in physics and mathematics. He was an unsociable, modest boy. He was often teased because of his father's political views.

In 1988, Linus entered the University of Helsinki, from which he graduated in 1996 with a master's degree in cybernetics.

Linus Torvalds lives in Portland (USA, Oregon) with his wife Tove (Finnish: Tove Torvalds, née Tove Monni), six-time Finnish karate champion and former student of Linus, three daughters: Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20, 2000).

From February 1997 to June 2003, he worked at Transmeta Corporation, after which he moved to Open Source Development Labs (now The Linux Foundation). Although the Linux Foundation is located in Beaverton. Beaverton), Torvalds works from home.

Linus Torvalds' personal mascot is the penguin Tux, which also became the emblem of Linux. In his book Just for Fun, Torvalds writes that he chose the penguin as an emblem because he was once pecked by a penguin at the zoo.

One of the “Linus Laws”, finally formulated by the American hacker Eric Raymond, states: “With enough eyes, all mistakes lie on the surface.” A deep error is one that is difficult to find. However, if enough people look for errors, they will all come to the surface. Both programmers share an open source ideology, based in part on a belief in this law.

However, their views differ on what is more important: open source or “free” programs and their distribution (Raymond is a supporter of the latter).

In 1981, Leo, Linus's grandfather, a mathematician, introduced his grandson to the Commodore VIC-20 computer, which he used for mathematical calculations. Linus became interested in programming and read the manuals for the machine. He then began reading computer magazines and writing his own programs, first in BASIC and then in assembly language.

Since his school years, Linus received scholarships for his success in mathematics. The first computer he bought was a Sinclair QL, which then cost almost $2,000.

After graduating from school, Linus entered the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The training was interrupted by a year of military service.

A significant event in Torvalds’ life was his reading of Andrew Tanenbaum’s book “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” ( Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, ISBN 0-13-638677-6). The book, using the example of the Minix OS written by Tanenbaum, presents the structure of UNIX family systems. Linus was very interested in what he read. Later he bought a new computer based on a 386 processor and installed Minix.

On September 17, 1991, Linus released the source code of the program (version 0.01) for public download. The system immediately aroused great interest. Hundreds, then thousands of programmers became interested in the system (the directory with the program, for lack of better options, was called “Linux”) and worked on improving and adding to it. It was and is still distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License - GPL.

“I still believe that creating a monolithic kernel in 1991 was a fundamental mistake. Be grateful that you are not my student: I would not give a high mark for such a design :-)” (from a letter to Linus Torvalds). Tanenbaum titled his post “Linux is obsolete.”

In addition to the monolithic kernel, Tanenbaum criticized Linux for its lack of portability. Tanenbaum predicted that 80x86 processors would disappear in the near future, giving way to the RISC architecture.

The criticism hit Torvalds hard. Tanenbaum was a famous professor and his opinion mattered. On this point, however, he was wrong. Linus Torvalds insisted that he was right.

The openness of the kernel written by Linus made it possible to use it in conjunction with the developments (GCC compilers, basic OS utilities) of GNU, a project of a free version of the UNIX system that has existed since 1983 (this entire system is often called “Linux”, but it would be more correct to call it “ GNU/Linux"). The popularity of the system grew, and later journalists all over the world started talking about it. "Linux" and Linus became famous.

Currently, only about two percent of the Linux system kernel is written by Torvalds himself, but it remains up to him to decide whether to make changes to the official kernel branch. At the same time, Linus himself uses the Fedora 14 system, but in Lately presumably leaning towards switching to openSUSE.

Torvalds owns the Linux trademark and monitors its use through the non-profit organization Linux International and with the help of Linux users around the world.

Confession

In 1996, asteroid No. 9793 was named after Torvalds.
In 1998 he received the EFF Pioneer Award.
In 1999 he received the status of doctor from Stockholm University.
In 2000 he received a doctorate from the University of Helsinki.
Awarded a medal for the development of information systems.
In Time magazine's "Man of the Century" poll, Torvalds was ranked 17th.
In 2001, he shared the Takeda Prize for Socio-Economic Prosperity with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura.
In 2004, he was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in the article "Linus Torvalds: Free Software Champion."
In the “100 Famous Finns of All Time” poll, Torvalds took 16th place.
In 2005, he proved himself to be the “best manager” in a BusinessWeek survey.
In August 2005, Torvalds received an award from Reed College.
In 2006, Time named him one of the revolutionary heroes of the past 60 years.
Business 2.0 magazine named him one of the "10 People Not Materialists" because the development of Linux has the individual characteristics of Torvalds.
In 2008, it was officially presented by the Computer History Museum in California.
On October 22, 2008, Linus Torvalds became a laureate of the annual Fellow Awards ceremony of the Computer History Museum (California, USA), receiving the award "for creating the Linux kernel and leading the open source development of the widely used Linux operating system".
2010 - C&C Prize
On April 20, 2012, Linus Torvalds (together with Japanese physician Shinya Yamanaka) won the Millennium Technology Prize (Finland). On June 13, 2012, it was presented to him by the President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö.
Elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
In April 2014, Torvalds received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award.

Linus Torvalds - photo

"I make free software because I think it's the only correct way to develop"

Linux distribution conditions were developed at an early stage. Linux is freely distributed and cannot be offered for sale. If the user made any changes or improvements to the system, he had to make them available to the public in the form of source codes.

"Game" in Linux

Linux 0.01

“Nobody actually produces great code the first time except me, but I’m the only one.”

And the following quote illustrates the term “entertainment” as Torvalds conceived it:

So, most of you are likely to be incredibly bored this Christmas, and here's the perfect entertainment for you. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the shops will be closed and there won't really be anything better to do in between eating.

And in 2003, he left the company to focus entirely on developing his OS. The departure was made possible thanks to the newly formed public organization The Linux Foundation (at that time it was called Open Source Development Labs), which provided Torvalds with health insurance and a salary.

Unexpected success

The Linux community became a kind of self-regulating organism that was not centrally controlled by anyone. Accordingly, there was no point in organizing a power struggle in the project. However, Torvalds is still credited with informal leadership. According to a famous quote, managing programmers is like herding a herd of cats. Perhaps Linus was able to find a balance between the general direction of the project's development and at the same time did not prevent the developers from walking on their own. Moreover, within the framework of this project, any participant can conduct their own development based on the Linux kernel without interfering with anyone.

You can also remember that like attracts like: being an adequate and self-critical professional without an inflated PSI, Torvalds naturally “attracted” to himself those who had similar qualities. At some point, Linux became the most successful opensource project. And as you know, a team most often achieves serious success when its members look in approximately the same direction.

Git

In 2005, Torvalds released Linux 2.6.12-rc2 and stated that he would not continue development of the operating system until there was a replacement for the BitKeeper repository that the Linux community had used until 2005. BitKeeper had to be abandoned due to disagreements with its developers regarding its free use in open source development. Toralds categorically did not like other source code control systems.

“As a result, I decided that I could write something better myself in two weeks, and I was not mistaken.”

Geek with character

I should caution you slightly that I'm not a very good speaker, partly because I don't like speaking, and partly because over the past few years everyone has wanted me to give talks on the dim future of Linux in the next century, and I don't really care. I'm a geek and prefer to talk about technology.

In his youth, he continued to suffer from all sorts of complexes associated with socialization. True, he suffered exclusively in his free time from programming - that is, quite rarely.

You can disagree with me all you want, but for the duration of this report, everyone who disagrees with me is, by definition, stupid assholes. Remember this! You will be free to do and think whatever you want when I finish my report. Now I'm telling you my only true opinion, so CVS users, if you really love it that much, get out of my sight. You need to go to a mental hospital or somewhere else.

The topic in which Torvalds feels confident becomes a field for improvisation, self-irony, coquetry and other forms of flirting with the public.

I started the project, developed the architecture and the initial code, and for the last year and a half it has been supported by a much nicer guy, the Japanese Junio Hamano, and he is the one who made Git more accessible to mere mortals. Early versions of Git did require a certain amount of "mental points" of brain power. Since then it has become much simpler.
In general, this is my usual approach - everyone else does their best, and I myself can just sit and sip a Pina Colada.

Linus Torvalds is no stranger to such qualities as frank frankness, bordering on demonstrative indecency. This is illustrated by the history of cooperation with NVidia in 2012.

Concluding his answer, Linus Torvalds summed up the above regarding NVidia, made an obscene hand gesture at the camera and declared: “NVidia, fuck you!”

On April 20, 2012, Linus Torvalds (together with Japanese physician Shinya Yamanaka) won the Millennium Technology Prize (Finland).

In 2014, Linus Torvalds received the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

$mob_info$