Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
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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)
Randomly 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.”
Do 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.
If 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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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?
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Mommy was one of the higher ups at IBM. Gates got most of it just handed to him. They are not the same.
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.
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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.
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Who's Gate?
The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly
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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.
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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.
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Do you have like a blog or something? Good bit of writing, this.
I am flattered, however no, I just shitpost here on lemmy and have no other social media presence.
Also I use AI tools to help me write like this. I like to twist context into funny things like this but it's more of an experiment than anything serious. -
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)
Stallman is certainly crazy I think.. and creepy.
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I don't think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.
I'm not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.
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The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly
Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.
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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.
ColdFusion
I was there, 3,000 years ago
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Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
Someone might remember Bill 300 years from now as a bump on the road for Linux.
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Is that why Outlook is so intuitive and easy to use?
I did say private individuals, Outlook is more of a corporate product.
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Luckily 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.
Most users neither know nor care what that is.
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I'm not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.
Yeah, probably not. But the idea that Windows won because of how great it was just doesn't hold up
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Most users neither know nor care what that is.
They might care when their os showing the same problems it did 30 years ago
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ColdFusion
I was there, 3,000 years ago
There are at least 2 of us! I think it was widely reported that the downfall of MySpace was at least partially linked to their use Coldfusion. When they needed to scale and adapt it just wasn't ready.
