Creator of Linux and Git

Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of the Linux kernel in 1991 as a university project and has maintained it ever since. In 2005 he wrote Git in about ten days to replace the proprietary version-control system the kernel had been relying on - a tool that now underpins nearly all modern software development. His GitHub account mirrors the kernel tree and a handful of smaller utilities, so the language breakdown is dominated by C, and the repository counts understate the scale of work that actually flows through his mailing-list-based review process.

• systems
• kernel
• c