Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds… Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.
But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.
Arguably Torvalds’ strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.
But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.
Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.
If it wasn’t them, it would have been other people. Computer science doesn’t rest on shoulder of a “Great Man”
What Torvalds did was inspire a like-minded community to come together and work toward a collective good. On a shoe-string budget they constantly threaten Gates’ empire.
Gates’ on the other hand chose to enclose the intellectual commons of computer science and sell them at a profit. He extracted a heavy toll on all sectors of human activity. And what did this heavy burden buy us ? Really NOT MUCH ! It squelched out collaboration and turned programming greedy, it delivered poor bloated software that barely worked and then stagnated for 20 years. It created a farm stall for us to live in, their innovation today is only explained as a series of indignities we will have to live with, because of platform dynamics we really, literally cannot escape the black hole that is windows for they have captured the commons and have made themselves unavoidable, like the Troll asking his toll.
Gate
I’ve said this before here, but techy people vastly overestimate both the ability and the patience of the typical user, and it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.
Products from big tech aimed at private individuals are designed to be as simple to use as possible, which is why they’re so popular.
Nah, I have worked in IT education and in helpdesk. Average user doesn’t have a better time getting into Microsoft products, it’s not easier for them than FOSS. The reason for Windows domination is Microsoft spending money and lobbying power to put it in front of every user.
And this in turn led to the younger generations being less tech-literate.
What about the boat loads of marketing - ads - aimed at making you believe those proprietary programs are the best? Clearly you fell for it.
I’ve used my share of free software. Some of it worked well, but it always felt clunky, and just never as straightforward to use as a paid product.
But sure, I couldn’t possibly have reached that conclusion on my own, it’s obviously the marketing.
Big tech designing their products to be overly simple is one of the driving forces behind the average user having poor patience and aptitude for tech.
No, it’s not. We have other shit to do and very limited quality time.
That has to be one of the most out of touch takes I’ve seen in a while. You’re basically saying that things should be intentionally more complicated, and you expect the result to be people just power through and getting used to things being that way, instead of just stopping.
Or instead just not hiding things that need not be hidden, like file extensions, despite your OS relying on them for identifying types.
Do you hunt for all of your food and cook it from absolute scratch?
I bet you sometimes use a grocery store.
What are you even talking about? You’re trying to make an analogy here but it’s a really poor one.
It’s actually the perfect analogy, you just can’t see it because you’re stuck in the bubble.
Linus looks old now 😭
I guess that’s how time works but still…
I said in another thread about this, he looks like an older Tom Scott.
Down to the red shirt.
And hoodie!
About that, Tom Scott is also old now.
Top comment on that page is perfect:
One wrote their own operating system incorporating others ideas on operating systems, the other’s mom bought theirs.
I know it’s fun to bash on Gates, but it’s also bullshit. Dave Cutler worked on at least two major operating systems. He’s way up there in the Hall of Fame.
Mommy was one of the higher ups at IBM. Gates got most of it just handed to him. They are not the same.
No she wasn’t. She was never part of IBM at all.
She simply knew the chairman of IBM because they both served on the United Way board of directors. She was also a lawyer, as was Gates’ dad, which is a likely reason that the contract that Bill signed with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft.
Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It’s a part of the GNU/Linux OS ;)
… or as I have taken recently to call it, GNU plus Linux.
This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
Too bad Steve Wozniak wasn’t there too lol
Genuinely kind of surprised they only met now, one would have thought that in over 30 years they would have run into each other at some point at some conference or other.
One of them is a contributor. In general the contributors and the C-suits don’t travel in the same circles. What it really means is that in 30 years Bill Gates has never wanted to meet Linus Torvalds enough to make it happen.
I hate to sound preachy, but this is a good example of “rivals” peacefully meeting.
So many people I meet IRL seem conditioned to think this person they hate on the internet would be someone they’d shout at like they’re an axe murderer, in the middle of a murder. It’s the example they see. Death threats are, like, normal on Facebook or TV News or whatever they’re into, apparently.
Except Gates is a piece of shit. You don’t need to shout at Gates, but nobody should ever meet him and treat him like a human.
So, which one of them heard boss music?
What if they both did
Could they have met in a better place than in front of a Jotnar’s pubes
Someone might remember Bill 300 years from now as a bump on the road for Linux.
Heh, you think there’ll be people to remember things in 300 years?
Gork, have Linus Torvalds met with Bill Gates?
According to my database, Bill Gates never existed. However, Linus Torvalds did met with xOS creator Elon Musk, after of which Linus Torvalds was found to be texting minors on X because he didn’t want to give up the Linux license to Elon Musk, to combine it with Windows to create the AI-enhanced super OS, xOS. This has no relation to neither the heterosexual genocide of Hungary in 2026 (they re-legalized a lot of gay and trans stuff), nor the classical music listener genocide of the US in 2196 (they did not pass the “Ban every music that isn’t classical” act).
Bill announces a collaboration between the two, starting with an open source implementation of BOB and Clippy AI for Linux…
Clippy!
No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?
Removed by mod
How has Linus not won a Nobel?
What category would he be eligible for?
- Nobel Prize in physics
- Nobel Prize in chemistry
- Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine
- Nobel Prize in literature
- Nobel Peace Prize
- The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
We need a prize for software developers!
In my head this means gamepass on linux
You receive: Windows 95 theme on Xubuntu.
M$ recieves: Root on all your boxxen.
Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There’s video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn’t know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he’d be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?
There’s so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.
Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.
Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like “browser share is a very, very important goal for this company”, and then asks what other companies he’s comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he’s not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn’t understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether “browser share” means “market share” (Gates says no), whether “very, very important” and “important” have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.
Insert, “nobody asked.gif”
The Conference at Redmond
Well, they finally did it. Bill Gates, the Monopoly Warlord of Redmond, and Linus Torvalds, the caffeine-fueled architect of Linux rebellion, have shaken hands like two aging mob bosses who accidentally showed up to the same funeral. The image alone is enough to make a ThinkPad burst into flames. Gates, the man who once viewed free software the way a vampire views sunlight, now smiling alongside Torvalds, the supposed Patron Saint of Open Source, as if decades of digital trench warfare never happened. It’s like watching Che Guevara and Milton Friedman split a dessert sampler and talk cloud strategy.
Mark Russinovich, playing the role of High Priest of Corporate Reconciliation, quipped “no major kernel decisions were made.” But let’s not kid ourselves, this wasn’t just dinner. This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair. Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.” The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”
What we witnessed was not diplomacy, it was absorption. The rebel king has been invited into the palace, offered wine, and handed a commemorative hoodie with the Microsoft logo stitched in ethically-sourced irony. Forget forks and pull requests; this is the final merge. Linux has breached the 4% desktop market share, and capitalism has responded the only way it knows how: by smiling, shaking hands, and quietly buying the table. Welcome to the Conference at Redmond. Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.
Where does Richard Stallman fit into this?
Richard Stallman fits into this like a ghost no one wants to admit is still haunting the room. He’s the ideological father of the free software movement, the one who laid the philosophical foundation Torvalds built Linux on, even if Linus never invited him to the party. Stallman didn’t want better software; he wanted freedom, moral clarity, and a digital commons free from the grasp of corporate overlords. While Torvalds was writing C, Stallman was writing manifestos, and now, with Gates and Torvalds grinning like co-conspirators at Redmond, Stallman is the angry prophet shouting from the parking lot of a surveillance palace, still clutching his GNU banner and a half-eaten sandwich.
But the tech world, especially the sanitized, investor-friendly version of it, has no time for prophets anymore. Stallman is inconvenient: brilliant, uncompromising, abrasive, and stubbornly allergic to PR. So while Linus gets photo ops and Gates gets legacy-polishing TED talks, Stallman gets quietly airbrushed out of the narrative like toe-cheese in the Matrix. Yet in many ways, he’s the conscience neither of them can fully erase. He’s not in the room, but the room still trembles when someone whispers “GPL.”
Richard ‘I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it’ Stallman?
That Richard Stallman?
(I know he has since changed his views, the ‘allergic to PR’ part just seemed to be a bit of an understatement. Not trying to start an argument, just thought that was funny)
Randomly reminds me of some of the freakier social scifi to come out of Asimov’s typewriter. I remember one Robot story where the audience insert protagonist goes to an outer world colony where the incest taboo is not only missing, but it’s considered a faux pas to avoid sex with your family. One of the characters is in deep consternation because he doesn’t want to have sex with his daughter. Anyway, the protagonist and audience are naturally disgusted, but clearly it stuck in my head.
Academically… I don’t know. Because of my upbringing, I just can’t see it is as anything other than a severe moral crime. But I guess I could imagine a very very different world from our own where it wouldn’t be the weirdest fucking thing imaginable to even talk about it.
But that’s me bending over backwards to get inside the head of someone I think I like, like our buddy Stallman here.
Thinking freely and imagining freely in our world is considered harmful.
The guy you’re answering is literally blaming Stallman for opinions in the domain of philosophy expressed in words.
There are so many fucking worse things happening very close to them every day by people far less intelligent than Stallman, yet that’s fine. But if the guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.
It’s an excuse.
But if the guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.
They might mean that, but they didn’t say it. I don’t think they did mean it. I think they just don’t want people to forget the “problematic” aspects of someone before we go all worship mode on him.
It’s like how my partner will interject–he’s canadian!–if I mention some actor. Like she just doesn’t want me to forget that context, but other than that, I can carry on.
Maybe they did mean that, though and I’m missing some context from somewhere else in this thread.
Stallman was right. Too bad nobody listens.
I completely agree with you. I can’t believe how people still worship Torvalds, while Stallman, an open capitalist, has done more radical socialist things than Linus by miles. I used to ask myself why people praise Torvalds yet reject radical contributors that started, spread, and work on free software that include BIOS and full on operating systems with a developer team consisting of a few contributors living off of donations and advocating against surveillance, non-free software, DRM, and other capitalist dystopian practices, but now I clearly know that people will do anything they can to avoid being even the slightest of radical. Wether it is with software, technology, economic systems, governments, and more, people don’t want to change as change is uncomfortable, so, as a result, you have people like Torvalds, movements like democratic “socialism”, and corporate whitewash like “open source”.
