The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing - Term Paper Example

?The importance of Linux creator Linus Torvalds contribution to computing Linux, which is the creation of one individual, Linus Torvalds has impactedthe business of millions of people all over the world over the years. With its distinctive features, it has transformed into a software environment that has changed the world for the better. According to an estimate made by the Linux counter, number of the users of Linux has exceeded 64 millions, and within the next two years, the Linux ecosystem is expected to become worth $50 billion (Tang, 2010). Torvalds belongs to a family of journalists in which he is thought of as a black sheep. 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, “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 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 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, “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 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 General 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 available for any modified versions that they create and then redistribute” (The Linux Information Project, 2006). Linux’s market has grown in the corporate networks, Internet driving centralized computers and the servers, which is something much more impressive than its household use. Precise measurement of Linux’s spread in no time to reach the home of a third world country’s resident as well as corporate businessmen’s offices. It can be freely downloaded from the Internet. The greatest strength of Linux depicts its open-source nature. Linux has evolved more as an art than a product that is modified. Linux is continuously being fiddled with extremely zealous and highly obsessed scholars and hobbyists of the high-tech unlike the conventional operating systems that employ programmers to make progress and improve their features. In the open source developing community, people contribute by making changes to Linux which are then entered into the Subsystem Guru which tests the changes. Once tested, the proposed change is sent to Andrew Morton who conducts the testing of system integration. The change thus approved is submitted to Torvalds for review. In the Linux release of March, 2005, number of developers was 475. This number increased to 920 in the release of June, 2007 (Klefstad, n.d.). Linux has been developed in such a way that it hardly ever crashes. The perpetual improvements have made Linux user friendly. It is installed very easily and is found very convenient even by the beginners. Linux far exceeds Windows in reliability, security and stability and the users benefit from the immunity Linux provides against the viruses and worms that have conventionally exploited the users of Microsoft. Current Linux in the kernel authored by Torvalds is no more than 2 per cent, yet Torvalds still invests a lot of time in deciding the modifications that need to be made. With increased availability of the Linux applications, Linux left Macintosh behind in the year 2003 and attained the status of “the second most popular desktop operating system” (NNDB, 2001), while Microsoft has sustained its number one position ever since. Torvalds’s success, to much an extent, can be attributed to his optimistic behavior and good moral conduct. In response to the critical analysts that have compared Linux to Microsoft, Torvalds said that he has always tried not to indulge in the debate about Microsoft. He holds the opinion that if somebody hates others and starts a business with an intention to destroy others’, there is little chance that the consequences would be favorable (NNDB, 2011). Torvalds has always presented himself like “a mild-mannered soul leading a humdrum life, just another guy lucky enough to own a McMansion in the hills above San Jose courtesy of the money-mad late '90s” (Rivlin, 2003). In light of the developmental process and the multiple successes Torvalds achieved by creating Linux as discussed in this paper, his importance in the world of computing becomes quite obvious. It has been over 20 years since Linux was found in the year 1991 and the lines of code have increased from 10000 in the start to more than 7 million recently (Tang, 2010). The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin said that it is not possible to overestimate Torvalds’s influence upon the software industry because he has been able to come up with the world’s biggest project of technology in the whole computing history. The number of people that have played their roles in improving the Linux kernel has increased manifolds in the last two decades, thus enabling the Linux to support an ecosystem worth $50 billion (Tang, 2010). References: NNDB. (2011). Linus Torvalds. Retrieved from http://www.nndb.com/people/444/000022378/. Klefstad, R. (n.d.). Experience with Open Source Development of Research Infrastructure Software. Retrieved from http://w3.isis.vanderbilt.edu/CST-HCCPS/papers/OpenSourceKlefstad.pdf. Rivlin, G. (2003, Nov.). Leader of the Free World. On Newsstands Now. 11.11. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus.html. Tang, F. (2010). Linus Torvalds' Contribution to the Museum's Oral History Collection. Retrieved from http://www.computerhistory.org/core/torvalds/. The Linux Information Project. (2006). Linus Torvalds: A Very Brief and Completely Unauthorized Biography. Retrieved from http://www.linfo.org/linus.html. Read More