Linus Benedict Torvalds (/ˈlaɪnəsˈtɔrvɔːldz/; Swedish: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds]; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish American software engineer, who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel that became the most popular kernel for operating systems, like GNU and Android. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the distributed revision control system git.