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.

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.”

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.

it could be the year

Maybe true today, but less true in earlier times (90s and early 2000s) when Microsoft was really gaining dominance.

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)

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.

Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.

Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It's a part of the GNU/Linux OS

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

The kernel is the OS though.

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.

I don't think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.

This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao

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.

In my head this means gamepass on linux