If he was there Richard Stallman too!!!

I don't know if I could vote Torvalds in that list, there is a lot of influence and power. MY votes would go to some people there that would be quite unpopular here.

Also, consider that Linus doesn't seem to be craving that sort of attention. (RSM sure-the-heck does ...)

Anyhow, "Linux as we know it today" is very much a collective effort, and that, in my humble opinion, is really what's so incredibly significant about the Linux system. While Linus was busy keeping himself warm in his dorm-room by the light of a computer screen, he was also sharing his work-product, and (not just "encouraging," but) obliging others to do the same. Many, many thousands of other people did, and this is a thing that has never occurred before.

Cooperative software development, being enabled by open source-code and open-source license agreements that have been upheld in international courts, is the "secret sauce" that has made possible virtually everything that we are enjoying today. "A rising tide does lift all boats." Linus Torvalds was a key college-student in that ... a very key player, of course. But maybe the genius of it all is that there never was "one, key, player."

So, perhaps we shouldn't "vote in" ... neither one person who craves such attention and always has, nor another one who hasn't.

As a collective effort I feel that more users bring more to the table. (Even *buntu's. )

Highly surprised that Mark Shuttleworth wasn't listed also, Stallman should have been with Linus as Linux wasn't an OS until GNU came along.

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GNU is Stallmans life work and it's very much being overshawdowed by Torvalds so of course he seeks publicity.

I've never seen so many crooks on one page before; I don't think RMS and Linus fit in with that crowd.

To my way of thinking ... "if we started naming names here, the list would go on forever-and-a-day."

For example, Richard Stallman gave us (the beginnings of ...) gcc. Need I say more?

And yet ... the true strength of the collective, cooperative, software development is that "all of us live and work on the shoulders of giants," even as we maybe also do our (maybe, or maybe not ...) smaller part in supporting the collective effort. As it turns out, the whole is vastly greater than the sum of its parts.

We used to be limited by the fact that software development was so expensive that no conventional business-model could really, profitably, support it. But, those concerns are not an issue anymore. We simply would not be where we are today – and we would not have the cool toys that we have today – without it. "Voting anyone 'in,'" well-intentioned though the thought might be, just might be missing the point.

Yea, I just went to the page - what a gang of thieves and useless people!

Stallman is more into "free" Where Torvalds is into the unix model of computing. I think windows would be fine with Stallman if it was "free" where as windows makes Torvalds sick.