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It was originally written by Linus and is quite old (the line about burning the GNU coding standards was there in the first Git import [1], but IIRC it's way older).

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/master/Documentation...

Looks like it was introduced in Linux 1.3.53, which is from Jan 1996. http://lxr.linux.no/#linux-old+v1.3.53/Documentation/CodingS...

I can not find proof right now, but I've read some version of this in the early 2000s and the (initial) author is Linus Torvalds. You should be able to tell by the style :)

I think it's just trying to emulate a colloquial tone, actually being written by a number of individuals (or at least being updated by multiple people).

You should run `git blame` on the file in the Linux repo.

Did you try it? I think you'd find it's part of the initial git commit on 2005-04-16: Linux-2.6.12-rc2

You could look in one of the historical trees.

http://mcvoy.com/lm/CodingStyle.txt

is the original history from the BitKeeper repo.