Torvalds, Linus

The Finnish creator and namesake of the Linux computer operating system, the open-source software fighting Microsoft’s dominance of the personal computer market. Torvalds coauthored a book in 2001 with the title The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the New Economy. In this book, he, Pekka Himanen (a former hacker and now a philosophy professor at University of Helsinki), and Manual Castells (a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley) focused on the White Hat side of hacking. The authors said that a hacker should be seen as an enthusiastic programmer who shares his or her work with others—not as some dangerous criminal. Torvalds’ home page can be found at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/ u/torvalds/.

See Also: Hackers; Himanen, Pekka; Linux; White Hats or Ethical Hackers or Sumarai Hackers.