alt Hacker NewsI am not claiming "invention", my whole point here is that place of origin means nothing, especially for a FOSS project - despite Linus being important part of it.
If we talk about OS being independent from US, the culprit is where does control(both in terms of technology and legislation) comes from. Main contributors are US companies(technological control) while Linus is obligated to comply to US laws and decisions as US citizen.
Active kernel contributors are spread all around the world, with a pretty even distribution across USA, Western Europe and Asia.
Your suggestion that the US government would lean on the citizenship of Torvalds in order to exert control over the kernel should be laughable but I concede that anything is possible these days.