Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
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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?
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I may frame this. Poetry.
Here is the historical picture to go along with it
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About that, Tom Scott is also old now.
That's why I said older.
But yeah ... Sad truths.
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Also, I never mentioned Photoshop. Open any standard drawing app that was developed recently: Procreate, Infinite Paint, Krita, Fresco. Look how straightforward it is to start working. Look at the Ui. It doesn't get in the way.
Edit: oh no the FOSS evangelists are not feeling it. I get it. I use a lot of FOSS apps for work. That doesn't mean we have to be evangelical in our defense of FOSS. Recognize there are issues and we can work to fix them. Don't get so defensive, Lemmy. My god.
I'm not going to spend hours downloading all of those and comparing and contrasting how easy I find their UIs. Some people have different hobbies. Imagine that, holy shit!
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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.”
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I'm not going to spend hours downloading all of those and comparing and contrasting how easy I find their UIs. Some people have different hobbies. Imagine that, holy shit!
Hey guess what? They pretty have the same minimalist ui. Way to miss the entire point I made
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Round 1, FIGHT!
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... or as I have taken recently to call it, GNU plus Linux.
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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.
Is that why Outlook is so intuitive and easy to use?
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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.”
Stallman was right. Too bad nobody listens.
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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.
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. -
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.
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it could be the year
Every year is the year
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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.
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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)
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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)
When have you stopped beating your wife ?
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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
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But, also, who thinks Photoshop is easier‽
As someone who'd learned Photoshop and, eventually, learned GIMP (just because it was easier to run after eventually switching to Linux), trying to argue that Photoshop has an industry stranglehold because it – apparently – is just so much more intuitive than GIMP is absolutely wild. No one I knew learning Photoshop was finding that the UI or layout just magically clicked (or even swiftly got less impenetrable, as time went on).
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Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
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Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It's a part of the GNU/Linux OS
The kernel is the OS though.
