Thirty years ago, Linus Torvalds was a 21 year old student at the University of Helsinki when he first released the Linux Kernel. His announcement started, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional…)”. Three decades later, the top 500 supercomputers are all running Linux, as are over 70% of all smartphones. Linux is clearly both big and professional. For three decades, Linus Torvalds has led Linux Kernel development, inspiring countless other developers and open source projects. In 2005, Linus also created Git to help manage the kernel development process, and it has since become the most popular version control system, trusted by countless open source and proprietary projects. The following interview continues our series with Open Source Leaders. Linus Torvalds replied to our questions via email, reflecting on what he’s learned over the years from leading a large open source project. In this first part, we focus on Linux kernel development and Git. “[Linux] was a personal project that grew not out of some big dream to create a new operating system,” Linus explains, “_but literally grew kind of haphazardly from me initially just trying to learn the in-and-outs of my new PC…