Stockholm University & Honorary Doctorate (Computer Science)

1988 - 1996

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY

Stockholm University & Honorary Doctorate (Mathematics and Science)

1999

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY

creation of the Linux kernel and the management of open source development

1991 - Present

Finland, New York, NY

• Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and oversaw open source development of the widely-used Linux operating system. Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His MSc thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
• An avid computer programmer, Linus authored many gaming applications in his early years. After purchasing a personal computer with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tannenbaum for use as a teaching tool. Torvalds started work on a new kernel, later to be named "Linux", in the fall of 1991 and after forming a team of volunteers to work on this new kernel, released V1.0 in the spring of 1994.
• In 1996, Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit the California headquarters of Transmeta, a startup company in the first stages of designing an energy saving central processing unit (CPU). Torvalds then accepted a position at Transmeta and moved to California with his family. Along with his work for Transmeta, Torvalds continued to oversee kernel development for Linux.
• In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Git was originally authored by Linus Torvalds

7 April 2005

New York, NY

• As with many great things in life, Git began with a bit of creative destruction and fiery controversy.
• The Linux kernel is an open source software project of fairly large scope. During the early years of the Linux kernel maintenance (1991–2002), changes to the software were passed around as patches and archived files. In 2002, the Linux kernel project began using a proprietary DVCS called BitKeeper.
• n 2005, the relationship between the community that developed the Linux kernel and the commercial company that developed BitKeeper broke down, and the tool’s free-of-charge status was revoked. This prompted the Linux development community (and in particular Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux) to develop their own tool based on some of the lessons they learned while using BitKeeper. Some of the goals of the new system were as follows: Speed Simple design Strong support for non-linear development (thousands of parallel branches) Fully distributed Able to handle large projects like the Linux kernel efficiently (speed and data size)
• Since its birth in 2005, Git has evolved and matured to be easy to use and yet retain these initial qualities. It’s amazingly fast, it’s very efficient with large projects, and it has an incredible branching system for non-linear developmen