The Linux trademark is owned by Linus Torvalds. Companies that use the term “Linux” for commercial distributions are apparently supposed to pay him a yearly licensing fee between $200 and $5000 for use of the name but there's some dissension as to whether or not they actually pony up.

Who owns Linux operating system?

Who “owns” Linux? By virtue of its open source licensing, Linux is freely available to anyone. However, the trademark on the name “Linux” rests with its creator, Linus Torvalds. The source code for Linux is under copyright by its many individual authors, and licensed under the GPLv2 license.

Is Linux owned by IBM?

With Red Hat, IBM has acquired one of the most important software companies in the IT industry. Red Hat's pioneering business model helped bring open source – including technologies like Linux, Kubernetes, Ansible, Java, Ceph and many more – into the mainstream for enterprises.