In short, Open Source is the source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. In layman's terms, free software! Torvalds is one of the major pioneers behind the infrastructure that supports open source software - Linux.

Born in Helsinki, Finland in 1969, Torvald's interest in computers began at the age of 11 with a VIC-90 computer which he learnt to programme himself.

By 1988 he was enrolled at the University of Helsinki studying computer science. During his time at university, Torvalds spent 11 months in the Finnish Navy as part of his mandatory military service.

While at University, Torvalds released the first prototypes of Linux publicly - an open source operating system (OS) for open source software. He finally graduated in 1996 with a Master’s degree.

A year later, Torvalds relocated to work for a computer company in California.

Due to his ongoing contributions in the open source community, and specifically Linux, in 1999 he was named by the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the world’s top 100 innovators under 35.

Also that year, two American software companies which used Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. That year, both companies went public and Torvalds share values briefly shot up to about US$20 million.

By 2003 Torvalds was working at Open Source Development Labs, an independent, non-profit organisation supported by a consortium to promote Linux for enterprise computing.

More recently, because of the dominance of Linux-based Android on smartphones, Linux, including Android, has the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems as of May 2022.

Linux is, as of March 2024, used by around 4% of desktop computers. Chromebooks, which runs on the Linux kernel-based Chrome Operating System, dominates the US high school market. Linux is the leading operating system on servers (over 96.4% of the top one million web servers operating systems are Linux). It is also used on all the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers.

As of 2006, approximately 2% of the Linux kernel was written by Torvalds himself. Despite the thousands who have contributed to it, his percentage is still one of the largest.

Torvalds is currently sponsored by the Linux Foundation to work full-time on improving Linux.

With such an impact, you can understand why we have named one of our meeting rooms after him!

If you are interested in hiring the Torvalds meeting room, or any other meeting rooms at Basestation, check out our website or come by and visit us. You can find us at 148 Durham Street, Tauranga. Our hours are 8:30am - 5:00pm Monday to Friday.