#8 Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict is a Finnish American software engineer and hacker, who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel operating system. After learning UNIX at university, he began to develop what would be his thesis: Linux. Since the publication of the Linux code in 1991, today millions of people use on their personal computers.

He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git as well as the diving log software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".

Torvalds was assisted minix programmers, so that his birth was entirely collective, with programmers around the world joining to help.