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.
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.
Maybe true today, but less true in earlier times (90s and early 2000s) when Microsoft was really gaining dominance.
I don’t think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.
When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid “wrong” actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don’t even think about it. Just get used that you don’t move the cursor after clicking there, you don’t click here again after a first double click, and other such.
While things like editing config files were … more normal for the average person even, you’d have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn’t expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.
Windows won because most people didn’t know of anything else.
And it is still true today. Windows has the lion share of the market because we were raised with Windows and the vast majority of people don’t want to learn a new OS.
I’m not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.
Yeah, probably not. But the idea that Windows won because of how great it was just doesn’t hold up
Luckily they learned from it and redesigned the kernel from scratch – hold on, my producer’s telling me that no, it’s still the NT kernel under there. Outstanding.
Most users neither know nor care what that is.
good talk
They might care when their os showing the same problems it did 30 years ago
What about the boat loads of marketing - ads - aimed at making you believe those proprietary programs are the best? Clearly you fell for it.
There are shit proprietary software and good proprietary software. There are shit FLOSS and good FLOSS
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.
Sounds like you’re cherry picking both; I’ve seen plenty of garbage that costs money as well.
Sure, but if you look at the top quality softwares, the majority of them are paid.
Because money is a big encouragement to make them as flawless as possible. Something FOSS just doesn’t have.
This is also far from my personal experience, you might not even realize what free software you’re depending on?
Your browser is most likely the most complex piece of software you interact with daily and it is most likely FOSS. The Linux kernel is FOSS and is incredibly robust. Most compiler suites, FOSS. Most programming languages, FOSS. These are all incredibly well written and robust tools. AOSP, kinda FOSS, and the forks like Graphene are definitely FOSS. Hell even a lot of macOS programs are actually FOSS. I could go on and on, there is absolutely amazing work being done on FOSS by incredibly talented people.
There is great paid and proprietary software out there, sure, but no it’s not the majority of top quality software in my personal experience and likely a lot of people’s experiences and it is almost guaranteed to rely on a FOSS library somewhere
They are used due to support not quality. Companies need to be able to purchase service and support agreements and very often FOSS has none of that.
And this in turn led to the younger generations being less tech-literate.
Is that why Outlook is so intuitive and easy to use?
I did say private individuals, Outlook is more of a corporate product.
People don’t have to compile their own kernel to benefit from FOSS. Their phone can run the Linux kernel and the services they use run on FOSS. The more stuff based on FOSS they use the less license fees and RnD they subsidize. Imagine if you had to pay for every FOSS instance you use. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, openssl, docker, WebKit, mySQL and whatever, the same way you pay for GSM or ARM trustzone or console-like-platform-tax
it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.
It’s a reason. Another reason is all the stuff that Microsoft was found guilty of doing during their conviction for abusing their monopoly.
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.
I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.
Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.
For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.
Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.
ColdFusion
I was there, 3,000 years ago
There are at least 2 of us! I think it was widely reported that the downfall of MySpace was at least partially linked to their use Coldfusion. When they needed to scale and adapt it just wasn’t ready.
If Microsoft hadn’t been around Apple would have probably defined the early PC era. The Apple II was released in 1977, 4 years before IBM decided to enter the home market with the PC.
Or Commodore might have been the one to dominate. They sold about 5 million Amigas.
Or it could have been NeXT after Jobs was forced out of Apple and started a new computer business.
The winner turned out to be Microsoft, but desktop computers were well on their way to being a standard thing long before Microsoft / IBM got into the market.
There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.
For me it’s interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.
That’s what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it’s a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we’ll see that, oh wonder, X11’s modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland’s. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.
Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.
I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.
OK, that’s what’s called “пикейный жилет” in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.
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.
Who’s Gate?
The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly
Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.
Frankly I have to mention one thing - while BG was in MS, the Windows world was kinda fine. He left before even Windows 7. He left after Vista, and Vista wasn’t very good, but what’s important - MS didn’t only do evil.
I mean, yeah, not “fine” fine, but when you are saying “and then stagnated for 20 years”, Bill wasn’t in MS for most of those 20 years.
I agree that platform dynamics suck, but I also very well remember from my childhood that I wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms like ICQ, not too opinionated and de-facto interoperable, or like Geocities, but people wanted platforms.
It was just plainly unavoidable. Everyone wanted webpages to be dynamic applications and everyone wanted platforms.
Yes, both are traps of evolution.
Say, dynamic pages I wanted would be more like embedded content in its own square, as it was with Flash. Just instead of Netscape plugin API and one proprietary environment it could involve a virtual machine for running cross-platform bytecode, or even just PostScript. Java applets were that idea, sort of (no sandboxing), as always Sun solved the hard problem perfectly, but forgot to invent a way for adoption. Maybe it could be allowed access to cut buffers and even the rest of the page. But that would be requested. This would prevent the web turning into something only Chrome can support.
Say, platforms I wanted would be more like standardized unified resources pooled. Storage resources and computing resources and notification servers and indexation servers for search, possibly partitioned to accommodate the sheer amount of data. Maybe similar to Usenet and NOSTR. With user application being the endpoint to mix those into a “social network” or some other platform. Universal application-agnostic servers, specific user applications.
But this is all in hindsight.
Bill announces a collaboration between the two, starting with an open source implementation of BOB and Clippy AI for Linux…
Clippy!
Now powered by Copilot!
CoClippy?
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.
Mommy was one of the higher ups at IBM. Gates got most of it just handed to him. They are not the same.
But but but… my parents stories about self-made, and cheapskate, and he’s rich cause apparently he’s not frivolous, and wears sweatpants, and other dumbass lies they ate up…
I bet my hand to the fire that Bill Gates didn’t eat avocado toast and made coffee at home and that’s why he is a billionaire today.
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.
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.
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.
The kernel is the OS though.
Is it, though? I don’t know about you, but most (if not all) of my interactions with my computer are at levels above the kernel
Then where do you draw the line?
The vast majority of people also don’t interact with the GNU tools at all, so GNU/Linux isn’t the OS either. KDE would be, or perhaps the distro itself. I’m not sure I’d call the OS GNU/Linux/Ubuntu/KDE. At that point might as well throw in firefox, for many it’s pretty much all the interaction they have with the computer.
Or what about the distros that don’t use the GNU coreutils? They are generally still called linux and still get to run apps made for linux, even with no traces of GNU.
I made that comment in slight jest. But anyway using non GNU OS still is consistent with my viewpoint that you don’t operate the kernel per se. The kernel sits at a layer below what the user operates.
As for the argument of apps being made for Linux, it is nothing more than just a semantic shortcut to the common ground between all these independent OS
Of course you don’t operate the kernel, but the kernel operates the system.
My point is that there are many layers between the kernel and user and which you interact with depends on the person. The only common point between all these, at least for linux, is the linux kernel itself.
I get that the “axchually GNU/linux” is just a joke, but considering how much impact linux has versus GNU, it’s totally fine to omit it. You can totally just use busybox instead and you’re still using a Linux OS.
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.
That’s why I said older.
But yeah … Sad truths.
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No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?
Missing the opportunity for a legit decent LinkedIn post?
I dunno. Tempting…
So, which one of them heard boss music?
What if they both did
There’s Dave Cutler in the article. They both heard boss music and it wasn’t theirs.
See, Dave Cutler’s level of “boss” for Unix would be Kirk McCusick or Bill Joy.
This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business.
That’s the secret to “earning” billions of dollars.
Dude, if I had no ethics, I would scam the fuck out of stupid people and get so rich. Damned moral compass…
Reverse Saruman, the money he donated made him look white.
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.
In my head this means gamepass on linux
You receive: Windows 95 theme on Xubuntu.
M$ recieves: Root on all your boxxen, all your data, and access to your eyes for ad space.
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.
Again at risk of reaching… this feels like positive masculinity to me.
And leaders acting like adults.
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.
Too bad Steve Wozniak wasn’t there too lol
Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t Gates retired? And I have no idea if Torvalds is still active.
But historical photo aside, isn’t this meeting a bunch of nothing?
Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he’s in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.
Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.
Gates is still very active in his charity organization
“charity”
Making money/influence. It’s such a scam his “Bill and Melinda Charity” (no taxes on charities).
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Name one bad historical person that didn’t do at least some good.
Your moral compass is broken.
The charity did more than some good though.
Also, name one good historical person that didn’t do at least some bad.
It is almost like things aren’t black and white but more like Yin and Yang.
That’s not how it works, it’s not like “I do some good, now I can do some bad”. It does not even out.
Bad people doesn’t become good because “some good things came out of it”.
If you do bad, then you are bad.
Their pr firm seems to function very well at least.
Guess you’re going to whitewash bezos, musk and zuckerberg next?
Edit: lot of free work done for the magnificent mr Gates and his tax avoiding fundation. Do you think you’ll get some crumbles from the rich mans table?
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It capitalized Wash because spell checker is the leaf on the wind.
Every dictator did “some good work”, are you thinking they are good people?
IMO your moral compass need maintenance.
the ends don’t justify the means.
Hitler experimented on hundreds of thousands of Jews and the medical world benefited from it greatly.
does that mean you’re going to nuance the Nazi regime because they “did some good”?
no amount of good is worth the ounce of evil used to make it.
edit: if the ends justify the means, where do you draw the line? how many lives must suffer in order for the goal to be achieved? 1 life? 10? 1 million?
and to those of you claiming Godwin’s law, I used it as an example. I don’t think Bill Gates is Hitler, I never even said anything like that. we could easily use the Tuskegee Airmen and the US Department of Health. How many of those families had to suffer to make the ends justified in your opinion.
IMO none. there is no amount of loss of life that is acceptance for any means. life is precious and unique and deserves to be protected.
edit 2: I didn’t realize humanity sold out their morals and ethics for the “greater good”. my mistake thinking we were better than that. sorry.
Lol no. Of all the sleazy and greasy millionaires, Gates is one of the few whose actions speaks for themselves. Dude has been doing noble causes for most of my life.
I’m all for talking shit about the rich, but it better be true.
His pr firm really works well.
Check out when elon ditched his pr firm. He went frm that loved lil crazy fun type to what he really is.
(no taxes on charities).
What type of taxes are you talking about?
It’s still giving money away though? Why would you want there to be taxes on charity?
It’s more nuanced though. Here’s how rich people use charities to gain wealth:
Rich person has tons of money that would be taxed if bill Y passes. Rich person creates a charity and donated 20% of what they would had to pay to the IRS to the charity, with that money the charity uses half for good causes and half is given to X lobby company, which then lobbies politicians to avoid passing that bill.
In the end, the rich person saved 80% of what they would had to pay.
Yeah, 10% went to good causes but imagine what the society could afford if 100% went through instead of 0.
This is a very rough outline of how they do it, but the summary is that they use charities to donate to lobbies while skipping taxes on the donation itself.
Yeah, 10% went to good causes but imagine what the society could afford if 100% went through instead of 0.
It’s the US, so more weapons I presume.
That’s the sentiment that allows these rich fucks to avoid paying taxes without big backlash. First focus on collecting, then on spending…
The point here is that in many jurisdictions doing charity exempts you from certain taxes, and it is possible to shuffle money around under the disguise of philanthropy while still getting all the financial benefits like an actual charity
Well that’s disgusting, ain’t it. 🫤
Amen
Because they are tax avoidance mechanism first and charity seconds.
Money is a brokering system of power, charitues being tax free makes these entities unaccountable to democratic institurions.
That’s how we ended up with this infection of corrupt megachurches.
The “prosperity gospel” is billionaire-serving propaganda. It empowers their formation, growth and necessary abuses that come from such widespread exploitation.
Gotcha. That sounds very bad indeed.
Giving away money? You sweet summer child.
Research don’t want “his” (the foundations) money, it comes with so many strings attached all your lives work now belongs to the B&M foundation.
You sweet summer child.
Alright dude, I don’t know much about the foundation, sorry. 🤷♂️
Search the web for “polio”
Google en passant.
Linus still approves the changes in the kernel. His main baby for the past 15 years or so has been GIT.
I think he maintained git at its inception for like 6 months and then passed it off to someone else, but I could be completely mistaken.
That means there are highschool seniors who weren’t even alive while Bill Gates was at Microsoft. Interns might not even know who he is.
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS 👏🎸
That was balmer though, IIRC. Crazy times
I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.
https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel
It was Balmer, but Gates was in the back clapping along and jumping over a chair lmao
I’m sure if they work there they know who he is though lol but possibly I suppose
without checking, Gates’ wealth is probably tied up in a lot of MS stock, and he could probably walk into the office and ask the intern to get him a coffee. but yeah i think mostly retired.
Linus is still active is maintaining the Linux kernel.
and yes, this is fluff, not some kind of summit
Gates could probably walk into most offices and get a free coffee and an impromptu meeting with the CEO if he wants to.
True, if anything he has less of a chance of getting a coffee at the MS office because the coffee machines will be out of order… “Kindly I’m Sorry sirs its on windows”
Still cool though. Also I think Bill has more money.
Than the intern? I mean…yeah. probably.
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).
it could be the year
…that Linus and Bill kiss? Will they or won’t they?
Gay (kernel) panic
At the disco
Every year is the year
Could they have met in a better place than in front of a Jotnar’s pubes
lol what is with the pube art
