"The father of modern day engineering"
A day ago someone in social control media posted this thread which said Torvalds is (or was) "a passionate engineer who did what he loved, and is still working to make this world a better place."
The points made are valid, but some people have brought up RMS (Richard M. Stallman), whose contributions are equally important if not more important, one might say "prerequisites".
Let's examine RMS in the same "colours":
RMS thought UNIX and other systems were becoming too restricted, so he created a "UNIX clone" that was free or rather a free system modeled after the UNIX design. He called it GNU, clarifying (in a satirical, recursive way) that it was "not UNIX".
RMS thought copyrights were getting in the way of sharing code, so he created copyleft and the GPL.
RMS thought software patents and other restrictions (e.g. TiVoisation) were getting in the way of running or modifying free code, so he created the third version (or iteration) of the GPL.
RMS thought a compiler was crucial, so he and others made GCC, which is still very widely used 4 decades later. Without GCC and the GPL, Linux would probably never succeed. Linus Torvalds acknowledged this in some old interviews.
RMS made many other things when the need arose, but the "mainstream" psyche likes to exclude RMS because of his beliefs about the "tech" (or Tech with capital T) industry, about politics, and about software philosophy. █
