Software engineer Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux (pronounced LIH-nucks) operating system, a program that by the late 1990s was getting attention as a potential competitor to the powerful Microsoft Windows, which runs about 85 percent of the world's computers. This would be intriguing enough if Torvalds was a software guru out to topple Microsoft as a leader in this market, but astonishingly, after cobbling together the project on his own time for his own use as a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, the Finnish programmer posted the system and all its code (the set of instructions used to create it) on the Internet, free to anyone who wanted it. His motivating factor, then, was not to earn money from a superior product, but just simply to build a better quality, more reliable operating system. "People have grown used to thinking of computers as...