Linus Torvalds Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds (; ; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish–American software engineer who is the creator, and historically, the principal developer of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for many Linux distributions and operating systems such as Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed version control system Git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. 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
Darwin (operating system) and the free/open source community benefited from being given complete control over its own operating system, which could then be used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin. On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this." The