The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper

The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing - Term Paper Example He was named Linus as a result of his parents’ inspiration with the chemist Linus Pauling who had won the Nobel Prize. Linux success as a desktop operating system is not a one-time story. Several accounts of its success and fame can be found in the literature that emerged since 1991 to date. In the year 2003, when Linux was only 12 years old, an analyst said, â€Å"Twelve years on, the operating system is robust enough to run the world's most powerful supercomputers yet sleek and versatile enough to run inside consumer toys like TiVo, as well as television set-top boxes and portable devices such as cell phones and handhelds† (Rivlin, 2003). In 2008, Torvalds’s contribution to the computing world was appreciated by awarding him the CHM Fellow Award. Torvalds supervised the creation of the Linux operating system and the Linux kernel. Torvalds resolved to develop an altogether new operating system which would be based on UNIX as well as MINIX. It can not be said wit h extreme surety that Torvalds was totally aware of the effort and time that would go into the achievement of this goal or the influence this development would have both upon the word of computing and his personal life. This can be estimated from the fact that for Torvalds, developing such an operating system was nothing more than a project that he planned to do in the break he took while doing the four-year graduation course he was doing in a university in Finland. In the beginning, Linus was not more than an operating system but it became much more as Torvalds studied and meddled with MINIX, which was another operating system like UNIX. Originally, the operating system was named Linux. This name was derived from the combination of Linus and MINIX, though Torvalds planned to change the name to Freax which came from free, freak and MINIX’s combination. Nevertheless, the name Linux became popular among the users as a result of the development of a directory by Lemmke in which he had called the operating system, Linux upon the file transfer protocol (FTP) server (The Linux Information Project, 2006). In an attempt to gain reviews, Torvalds posted Linux in one of the MINIX forums, and the feedback was hilarious. Torvalds found that the users had become fanatic in their love for Linux. Despite the individualistic originality of Linux, it is, to much an extent, a product of collaboration. Within few years, Linux gained a wide fan-base many of whom were trying to play their role in the improvement of its features. Acknowledging their contribution and appreciating their efforts, Torvalds said, â€Å"They always volunteered. I wouldn't even want to work with people who don't feel passionately about what they do because searching for people to do something doesn't work†¦ It started out slow and on a very small scale. But it was a natural progression† (Tang, 2010). Internet has played a fundamental role in helping the Linux spur the movement of Open S ource. When he reflected upon the whole experience of creating the Linux, Torvalds realized that one of the most informed decisions that he made along the way was of not releasing Linux under the restrictive license that he had originally planned for, but under the GNU General Public License (GPL). GPL is the most frequently used free software license which enables people â€Å"to study, use, modify, extend and redistribute the software as long as they make the source code freely