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

  • nucleative@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      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.

      • lefixxx@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        People 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

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        it’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.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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      8 days ago

      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.

      Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

      • nucleative@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        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.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          8 days ago

          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.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.

        For me it’s interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.

        That’s what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it’s a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we’ll see that, oh wonder, X11’s modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland’s. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.

        Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.

        I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.

        OK, that’s what’s called “пикейный жилет” in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.

  • comador @lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Bill announces a collaboration between the two, starting with an open source implementation of BOB and Clippy AI for Linux…

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.

    Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      There’s Dave Cutler in the article. They both heard boss music and it wasn’t theirs.

      See, Dave Cutler’s level of “boss” for Unix would be Kirk McCusick or Bill Joy.

  • mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      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.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t Gates retired? And I have no idea if Torvalds is still active.

    But historical photo aside, isn’t this meeting a bunch of nothing?

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      9 days ago

      Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he’s in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.

      Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.

      • PacMan@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Linus still approves the changes in the kernel. His main baby for the past 15 years or so has been GIT.

        • offspec@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          I think he maintained git at its inception for like 6 months and then passed it off to someone else, but I could be completely mistaken.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      without checking, Gates’ wealth is probably tied up in a lot of MS stock, and he could probably walk into the office and ask the intern to get him a coffee. but yeah i think mostly retired.

      Linus is still active is maintaining the Linux kernel.

      and yes, this is fluff, not some kind of summit