Richard Stallman Mellon's Mach microkernel in a project called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for full POSIX compliance. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU's development tools to produce the free monolithic Linux kernel. The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform. Most sources use the name "Linux" to refer to the general-purpose operating system thus formed, while Stallman and the FSF call it "GNU/Linux". This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the
Linus Torvalds the issue of church and state separation, Torvalds also said, "Yeah, it's kind of ironic that in many European countries, there is actually a kind of legal binding between the state and the state religion." However, in a story about the March LinuxWorld Conference titled "Linus the Liberator", Torvalds is quoted as saying "There are like two golden rules in life. One is 'Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.' For some reason, people associate this with Christianity. I'm not a Christian. I'm agnostic. The other rule is 'Be proud of what you do. In