Initially, Linus Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it was a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted, named Torvalds' directory linux. So, the name "Linux" (Linus Unix) was stuck. The rest is history.