Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
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it could be the year
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:07 zuletzt editiert vonEvery 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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:11 zuletzt editiert vonI 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.”
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:15 zuletzt editiert vonRichard '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)
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:29 zuletzt editiert vonWhen 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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:55 zuletzt editiert von qqq@lemmy.worldThis 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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schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 14:59 zuletzt editiert von
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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:10 zuletzt editiert vonThis 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
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:14 zuletzt editiert vonThe kernel is the OS though.
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Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:17 zuletzt editiert vonSomeone, a big turd, a turd, and someone
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This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:19 zuletzt editiert vonObviously 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.
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The kernel is the OS though.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:50 zuletzt editiert vonIs 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
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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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 15:55 zuletzt editiert vonPeople 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
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I don't think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 16:35 zuletzt editiert vonLuckily 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.
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This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 16:41 zuletzt editiert von oce@jlai.luReverse Saruman, the money he donated made him look white.
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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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 16:44 zuletzt editiert vonInsert, "nobody asked.gif"
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In my head this means gamepass on linux
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 16:45 zuletzt editiert vonYou receive: Windows 95 theme on Xubuntu.
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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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 17:04 zuletzt editiert vonit'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.
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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)
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 17:12 zuletzt editiert vonRandomly 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.
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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.”
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 17:14 zuletzt editiert vonDo you have like a blog or something? Good bit of writing, this.
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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.
schrieb am 23. Juni 2025, 17:14 zuletzt editiert vonIf 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.
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