Linus Torvalds

inducted in the class of 2004

Notable accomplishments:

• Developed the Linux open-source operating system (1991)
• Developed the Git distributed version-control system (2005)

Quotes:
 “I think one of the reasons people found Git to be very hard to use was that most people who started without using Git were coming from a background of something CVS-like. And the Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person’s standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo. And like the biggest issue for me — well, there were two huge issues. One was performance — back then I still applied a lot of patches, which I mean, Git has made almost go away because now I just merge other people’s code But for me, one of the goals was that I could apply a patch series in basically half a minute, even when it was like 50, 100 patches. And that was important to me because it’s actually a quality-of-life thing. It’s one of those things where if things are just instant, some mistake happens, you see the result immediately and you just go on and you fix it. And some of the other projects I had been looking at took like half a minute per patch, which was not acceptable to me. And that was because the kernel is a very large project and a lot of these SCMs were not designed to be scalable.” (Interview with GitHub, April 9, 2025)

Suggested reading:
“Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary” by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond (2001)

Learn more:
Biography at IEEE Computer Society