Linus Benedict Torvalds (; ; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer, who is the creator of the Linux kernel and for a long time, principal developer; that became the kernel for operating systems (and many distributions of each), such as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel". He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.