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

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 '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)

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.”

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.

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.

Mommy was one of the higher ups at IBM. Gates got most of it just handed to him. They are not the same.

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.

Who's Gate?

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.

You receive: Windows 95 theme on Xubuntu.

Do you have like a blog or something? Good bit of writing, this.