StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...
Free

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

Cite this document
Summary
"The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds's Contribution to Computing" paper focuses on Linus Torvalds who has impacted the 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. …
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER95.1% of users find it useful
The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing"

?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
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper”, n.d.)
The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper. Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/information-technology/1431846-the-importance-of-linux-creator-linus-torvalds
(The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper)
The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper. https://studentshare.org/information-technology/1431846-the-importance-of-linux-creator-linus-torvalds.
“The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Term Paper”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/information-technology/1431846-the-importance-of-linux-creator-linus-torvalds.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF The Importance of Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Contribution to Computing

Computing platforms

The DistroWatch website that promotes the use of linux/BSD provides the latest information on popular distributions of linux/BSD on their website ranked on a certain basis/criteria.... The bewildering choice and the ever increasing number of linux distributions can be confusing for those who are new to Linux.... This report aims to provide an understanding of the state of the art on issues that are to be considered for deployment of redundant hardware resources in UK for teaching of IT skills in the secondary schools at various locations in Africa using the linux Operating System....
33 Pages (8250 words) Dissertation

Introduction to computing

To understand how this works, it is necessary to understand the difference between the shell and the kernel embedded in the operating system as well as the main features of graphic user interfaces as opposed to command line or human/computer interfaces, ending with a look at some of the more common programs such as Unix, linux and Windows Vista....
12 Pages (3000 words) Essay

Open Source Software

For example, linux is a good example of open source software that is competing with Microsoft, Apple and other.... In the paper “Open Source Software” the author discusses open source software is becoming the most interesting part of the information technology.... It has generated interested similar to the first moments of the internet....
6 Pages (1500 words) Article

The LInux Operating System

Due to its robustness and easy to use features as well as the fact that it is free to use, Linux has been on the forefront of cutting edge… Linux is being used in many corporations and governmental agencies precisely because of the advantages it confers on the users. The other notable feature of linux is the ability to modify the source code by anyone for their Thus, one can download the software and edit and make changes as per one's requirements.... Linux operates in many flavors and some of the popular distributions of linux are Fedora Core, Debian and SuSE Linux....
4 Pages (1000 words) Research Paper

Linux OS Performance

In 1991, a gentleman known as torvalds became curious about OS and invented this system in university of Helsinki.... linux is utilized by both personal and business enterprises which makes it feasible for any organization.... It is evident that linux is still highly used in server side.... Organizations such as IBM have been utilizing linux for decades now.... Around 30% of PCs run linux, and 60% of servers run linux....
3 Pages (750 words) Assignment

Linux Corporation as the Market Leader in the Operating System Industry

The basic aim of this research is to find out the feasibility of using linux instead of Microsoft Windows for home and business.... Nowadays people prefer linux for tasks such as the small office/home office tasks, which include backups, emergency disks, and other administrative tasks.... hellip; Another aim of this paper is to bring out the main reasons and points that make the linux the most efficient operating system for all purposes.... For this purpose, I will present a comparison oriented approach among linux and Windows....
25 Pages (6250 words) Research Paper

History of LINUX

In 1991, linus torvalds, from Helsinki University, Finland, started a personal project with an objective of creating an operating system kernel that was free and widely adaptable, just like it was required by personal computers at that particular time.... This review ''History of linux'' discusses that the history of linux has been quite spectacular given the controversy it has raised and the simplicity involved in its features.... Oodles of factors contributed to the advent of linux....
6 Pages (1500 words) Literature review

Operating System Proposal

Companies involved in the economy of linux share development and research costs with their competitors and partners (Raymond, 2001).... Though Linux has enjoyed incredible achievement since the first request of torvalds in 1981, it is in numerous ways still at the start of its potential.... This paper is about the linux as software on the computer that allows computer operator and applications to get to devices on the computer to carry out required roles....
10 Pages (2500 words) Literature review
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us