These open-source innovations are impressive but still fledgling, and to many the movement may look unfeasibly utopian. So remember the 21-year-old Finnish computer student, Linus Torvalds, who in 1991 was writing the kernel of an open-source operating system – just for a hobby, he said – which quickly morphed into Linux, now the most widely used computer operating system in the world. At the time, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux ‘a cancer’, but today even Microsoft has embraced the movement by using Linux in its own products.43 ‘The story of open-source software is a little portal
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