Linus Torvalds Is Now a U.S. Citizen

Linux kernel architect and sexy programmer Linus Torvalds has been living in the United States since he moved here from Finland in 1997, and two of his American-born kids are U.S. citizens by virtue of their birth. (One Slashdot commenter wittily points out that this makes them “GNU/Anchor babies.”) But earlier this month, Torvalds announced that he had finally taken the step of becoming a U.S. citizen himself.

Writing on the Linux kernel mailing list yesterday, Torvalds offhandedly mentioned that he would test something “in a bit – I need to go do voter registration and socsec update first, though – I became a US citizen last week.”

Torvalds touched on this ground before in a 2008 blog post:

Yeah, yeah, we should probably have done the citizenship thing a long time ago, since we’ve been here long enough (and two of the kids are US citizens by virtue of being born here), but anybody who has had dealings with the INS will likely want to avoid any more of them, and maybe things have gotten better with a new name and changes, but nothing has really made me feel like I really need that paperwork headache again.

Well: Paperwork headache reckoned with. Congrats to Torvalds on his citizenship.

(Network World via Slashdot)

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Robert Quigley