Free Software Linux

To know Linus better, here are some brief but important facts that I have gathered about him:

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, the capital and largest city in Finland. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although he claims he was named after Linus in the Peanuts comic strip. In the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the peanut-cartoon character," noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character."

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System. From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.

It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20.

Linus quickly developed the terminal emulation program and it was sufficient for his needs for a while. However, Linus began thinking that it would be nice to be able to do other things with it like tranferring and saving files. This is where Linux was really born. Originally, Linus wanted to name his creation 'Freax' (pronounced like the English word freaks). He changed it to Linux at the prompting of a friend. In August, 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system. This now famous announcement launched the biggest collaborative project the world has ever known. Linus uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux belonged to the world.

About 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.

Some Famous Quotations of Linus Torvalds:

“Any program is only as good as it is useful. “

“Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it. “

“I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly. “

“I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places. “

“I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.”
“Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all. “

“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. “

“Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many. “

“See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too. “

“Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software. “

“Software is like sex: it's better when it's free. “

“There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is. “

“What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out. “

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."

Thanks to: wikipedia.org, linux.org, linfo.org