Linus Torvalds

He is married to Tove Monni, a karate champion. The couple has three daughters.

He calls himself an atheist. He is completely irreligious and believes that religion should be a personal choice and not a political issue.

In 2010, he became a citizen of the United States of America.

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. His parents are Anna and Nils Torvalds, both of whom are journalists. He is the grandson of the Finnish-Swedish journalist and poet, Ole Torvalds.

Between 1988 and 1996, he studied at the University of Helsinki, from where he obtained a master’s degree in computer science. He belonged to the NODES research group.

During his period of study, he became a part of the Finnish Army and attended an eleven month training programme in order to meet the compulsory military service criteria of Finland. This interrupted his studies.

While in the army, he reached the position of a second lieutenant. In 1990, he went back to university to continue his studies. It was during this time that he got acquainted with the operating system, ‘Unix’.

He wrote his Master’s thesis on ‘Linux: A Portable Operating System'. He became fascinated and deeply interested in computer science after he worked on the 8-bit home computer, VIC-20.

In 1991, he purchased the Intel 80386-based IBM PC and obtained a MINIX operating system. With this, he began to work and research on the Linux operating system.

In 1996, he went on a visit to the technology firm, ‘Transmeta’, where he began to work from the following year. He later worked for the Open Source Development Labs.

From 1997 to 1999, he worked on the '86open' project, which is a binary file format for the ‘Unix’ and Unix-like operating systems. They were to be used on a common x86 PC.

In 1999, he was offered stock options for his creation by the companies, Red Hat and VA Linux. That very year, the stock prices increased to about $20 million after the companies went public.

In June 2004, along with his family, he relocated to Beaverton, Oregon, where Open Source Development Labs was headquartered. The following year, he developed the software, ‘Git’.

He is the founder and the creator of the new operating system ‘Linux’, which was released in 1991. This Linux kernel is one of the most significant free and open source software.