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Linus Benedict Torvalds (ˈliːnəs_ˈtɔːrvɔːldz , ˈliːnʉs ˈtuːrvɑlds; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions like Debian, Arch and Android. He also created the distributed version control system Git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel." He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award and the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award. Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds, and the great-grandson of journalist and soldier Toivo Karanko. His parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. He was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize–winning American chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, he is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this made 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 from the NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Navy Nyland Brigade in the summer of 1989, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. He gained the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of an artillery observer. He bought computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, in which Tanenbaum describes MINIX, an educational stripped-down version of Unix.

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Related concepts (58)

Linux (ˈlɪnʊks ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.

The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix. Linux is provided under the GNU General Public License version 2 only, but it contains files under other compatible licenses.

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