Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time.
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
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...
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.
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
Reverse Saruman, the money he donated made him look white.
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...
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.
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.
I may frame this. Poetry.
Where does Richard Stallman fit into this?
This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair.
Linux people have forgotten, but "the bazaar" is not Windows. It's old Unices and BSDs. Say, Solaris and FreeBSD.
Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.”
That forgives your sins.
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.”
I felt that line.
Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.
I (proverbially) weep because there were 4 people at that dinner, and you didn't even mention the guy who made VMS.
Dunno, I actually like how this reads. It doesn't explain on which specific points and to which ends he argued, and MS monopoly is a bad thing. But if I were defending a position, I'd do the same. If not to stall and disorganize, then to avoid being caught on unfortunate words.
He's very legally literate, I'd expect, so such things are where it'd do us good to learn from him.
Like for Troy you'd do well to learn from Greeks who actually won, not from Troyans who lost. No matter where your sympathies lie.
What else would you expect from the "dictator for life", that he would have the social skills NOT to attend "Conference at Redmond" ?
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".
Insert, "nobody asked.gif"
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.
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
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).
Could they have met in a better place than in front of a Jotnar's pubes
lol what is with the pube art
How has Linus not won a Nobel?
What category would he be eligible for?
The peace price because Linux is bringing peace on ear-
We need a prize for software developers!
I would've suggested math but Huh send like there isn't a category for it
Peace Prize!
If writing code and the J4F book qualify as "literature", then certainly. Also some of the mailing list posts by Linus - mwahaha.
Round 1, FIGHT!
Now kithhh
Someone, a big turd, a turd, and someone
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.
What about the boat loads of marketing - ads - aimed at making you believe those proprietary programs are the best? Clearly you fell for it.
And this in turn led to the younger generations being less tech-literate.
Is that why Outlook is so intuitive and easy to use?
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
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.
It's a reason. Another reason is all the stuff that Microsoft was found guilty of doing during their conviction for abusing their monopoly.
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.
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?
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.