The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper

The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing - Term Paper ExampleHe was named Linus as a result of his parents inspiration with the druggist Linus Pauling who had won the Nobel Prize. Linux success as a desktop run 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 tell, Twelve years on, the operating system is robust enough to run the worlds well-nigh 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, Torvaldss 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 settle to develop an altogether new operating system whic h would be based on UNIX as well as MINIX. It can not be said with 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 intelligence service 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 be after 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 MINIXs 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 fiend 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 character in the improvement of its features. Acknowledging their contribution and appreciating their efforts, Torvalds said, They always volunteered. I wouldnt even want to work with hatful who dont feel passionately about what they do because searching for people to do something doesnt work It started out slow and on a very small scale. But it was a natural progression (Tang, 2010). Internet has played a fundame ntal role in helping the Linux spur the movement of Open Source. 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 normal Public License (GPL). GPL is the most frequently used free software license which enables people to study, use, modify, extend and redistribute the software as long as they make the source code freely