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Linus Torvalds
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Linus Torvalds is the genius from Finland who created Linux and wrote the first Linux kernel. He is an extremely talented programmer and yet he's very modest. (The guy doesn't even make a profit from any of the distributions of Linux out there.) He is the total opposite of Microsoft's Bill Gates (who fears the growth that Linux has experienced in the past 14 years). Linus is a creative, good natured programmer who derives satisfaction from putting out an open source OS that actually works. On the other hand, Bill Gates is an unoriginal person, who likes destroying small companies, and derives satisfaction from making grossly unnecessary gobs of money from selling software that crashes often.
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Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki -- far from the seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power -- in this case, their computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang -- the wine, the bread and the translated Word -- available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to revoke the developer's proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full operating system source code be delivered -- without cost -- to every ordinary Joe at the desktop.
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Linux won't switch to GPL version 3, the draft of which was just released by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, if Linus Torvalds has anything to do with it, News.com reports. Torvalds objects to the "highly agressive" stance the new license takes against digital rights management. In introductory langauge,... Tags: GPL, Linus Torvalds, Linux Blog posts 2006-01-26
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Linus Torvalds, a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in his early twenties, took his first course on Unix and C in the Fall of 1990. In the Spring of 1991 Linus was running Minix (a small Unix-like operating system designed for teaching) at home on his new 386. What was to become Linux started in the Summer of 1991 as a basic protected mode system that evolved from a Hello World program into a terminal program. By October 1991 Linux 0.02 was announced to the world. In two years, through the hard work of Linus and many other people, Linux, currently at version 0.99, has become an extremely useful and popular operating system. The comp.os.linux.* hierarchy is among USENETs busiest and there are several companies selling Linux and providing professional support.
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Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, started working on the open-code operating system as a student ten years ago because he was not satisfied with the tools available at his university. He made the system available to enthusiasts through the Internet and developed it with the help of free programming contributions from all over the world. Linux, a Unix-like OS, continues to enjoy a meteoric rise in prominence as an alternative on the server to both Unix and Windows NT. In 1998, International Data Corp. found that 13 percent of the corporations it surveyed used Linux in some capacity. Dataquest expects the Linux-based server appliance market to grow at approximately 69% a year between 1999 and 2003 and represent approximately 24% of the total server appliance market, or $3.8 billion, in 2003.
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OSDL -- home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux -- is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux. Founded in 2000 by CA, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel and NEC, OSDL is a non-profit organization at the center of Linux supported by a global consortium of more than 40 of the world's largest Linux customers and IT industry leaders. OSDL sponsors industry-wide initiatives around Linux in telecommunications, in the enterprise data center and on corporate desktops. The Lab ... provides Linux expertise and computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world. Visit OSDL on the Web at http://www.osdl.org/. OSDL is a trademark of Open Source Development Labs, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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