Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
For platforms that don’t accept those types of edits, the link OP tried to submit: https://www.theverge.com/news/690815/bill-gates-linus-torvalds-meeting-photo
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.
Bill announces a collaboration between the two, starting with an open source implementation of BOB and Clippy AI for Linux…
Clippy!
Now powered by Copilot!
CoClippy?
No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?
Missing the opportunity for a legit decent LinkedIn post?
I dunno. Tempting…
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?
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.
That means there are highschool seniors who weren’t even alive while Bill Gates was at Microsoft. Interns might not even know who he is.
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS 👏🎸
That was balmer though, IIRC. Crazy times
I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.
https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel
It was Balmer, but Gates was in the back clapping along and jumping over a chair lmao
I’m sure if they work there they know who he is though lol but possibly I suppose
Linus still approves the changes in the kernel. His main baby for the past 15 years or so has been GIT.
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.
Gates is still very active in his charity organization
Making money/influence. It’s such a scam his “Bill and Melinda Charity” (no taxes on charities).
We can point out how bullshit the charity system is in the US while also acknowledging that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has done some good
Their pr firm seems to function very well at least.
Guess you’re going to whitewash bezos, musk and zuckerberg next?
Lol no. Of all the sleazy and greasy millionaires, Gates is one of the few whose actions speaks for themselves. Dude has been doing noble causes for most of my life.
I’m all for talking shit about the rich, but it better be true.
His pr firm really works well.
Check out when elon ditched his pr firm. He went frm that loved lil crazy fun type to what he really is.
Nope. And I sure as hell don’t white WASH Bill Gates. You don’t get to that level of wealth and dominance without cracking skulls and ruining lives every step of the way. He is not a good person. But the foundation has done some good work. Surely this isn’t too nuanced for you to understand?
Every dictator did “some good work”, are you thinking they are good people?
IMO your moral compass need maintenance.
the ends don’t justify the means.
Hitler experimented on hundreds of thousands of Jews and the medical world benefited from it greatly.
does that mean you’re going to nuance the Nazi regime because they “did some good”?
no amount of good is worth the ounce of evil used to make it.
It capitalized Wash because spell checker is the leaf on the wind.
Name one bad historical person that didn’t do at least some good.
Your moral compass is broken.
The charity did more than some good though.
Also, name one good historical person that didn’t do at least some bad.
It is almost like things aren’t black and white but more like Yin and Yang.
That’s not how it works, it’s not like “I do some good, now I can do some bad”. It does not even out.
Bad people doesn’t become good because “some good things came out of it”.
If you do bad, then you are bad.
It’s still giving money away though? Why would you want there to be taxes on charity?
Giving away money? You sweet summer child.
Research don’t want “his” (the foundations) money, it comes with so many strings attached all your lives work now belongs to the B&M foundation.
You sweet summer child.
Alright dude, I don’t know much about the foundation, sorry. 🤷♂️
Because they are tax avoidance mechanism first and charity seconds.
Money is a brokering system of power, charitues being tax free makes these entities unaccountable to democratic institurions.
That’s how we ended up with this infection of corrupt megachurches.
The “prosperity gospel” is billionaire-serving propaganda. It empowers their formation, growth and necessary abuses that come from such widespread exploitation.
It’s more nuanced though. Here’s how rich people use charities to gain wealth:
Rich person has tons of money that would be taxed if bill Y passes. Rich person creates a charity and donated 20% of what they would had to pay to the IRS to the charity, with that money the charity uses half for good causes and half is given to X lobby company, which then lobbies politicians to avoid passing that bill.
In the end, the rich person saved 80% of what they would had to pay.
Yeah, 10% went to good causes but imagine what the society could afford if 100% went through instead of 0.
This is a very rough outline of how they do it, but the summary is that they use charities to donate to lobbies while skipping taxes on the donation itself.
Yeah, 10% went to good causes but imagine what the society could afford if 100% went through instead of 0.
It’s the US, so more weapons I presume.
That’s the sentiment that allows these rich fucks to avoid paying taxes without big backlash. First focus on collecting, then on spending…
The point here is that in many jurisdictions doing charity exempts you from certain taxes, and it is possible to shuffle money around under the disguise of philanthropy while still getting all the financial benefits like an actual charity
Well that’s disgusting, ain’t it. 🫤
Amen
(no taxes on charities).
What type of taxes are you talking about?
Search the web for “polio”
Google en passant.
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
Gates could probably walk into most offices and get a free coffee and an impromptu meeting with the CEO if he wants to.
True, if anything he has less of a chance of getting a coffee at the MS office because the coffee machines will be out of order… “Kindly I’m Sorry sirs its on windows”
Still cool though. Also I think Bill has more money.
Than the intern? I mean…yeah. probably.
In my head this means gamepass on linux
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.
Round 1, FIGHT!
Could they have met in a better place than in front of a Jotnar’s pubes
it could be the year
…that Linus and Bill kiss? Will they or won’t they?
Gay (kernel) panic
At the disco
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.
What else would you expect from the “dictator for life”, that he would have the social skills NOT to attend “Conference at Redmond” ?
I completely agree with you. I can’t beleive how people still worship Torvalds, while Stallman, an open capitalist, has done more radical socialist things than Linus by miles. I used to ask myself why people praise Torvalds yet reject radical contributers that started, spread, and work on free software that include BIOS and full on operating systems with a developer team consisting of a few contributers living off of donations and advocating against surveillance, non-free software, DRM, and other capitalist dystopian practices, but now I clearly know that people will do anything they can to avoid being even the slightest of radical. Wether it is with software, technology, economic systems, goverments, and more, people don’t want to change as change is uncomfortable, so, as a result, you have people like Torvalds, movements like democratic “socialism”, and corprate whitewash like “open source”.
The Conference at Redmond
Well, they finally did it. Bill Gates, the Monopoly Warlord of Redmond, and Linus Torvalds, the caffeine-fueled architect of Linux rebellion, have shaken hands like two aging mob bosses who accidentally showed up to the same funeral. The image alone is enough to make a ThinkPad burst into flames. Gates, the man who once viewed free software the way a vampire views sunlight, now smiling alongside Torvalds, the supposed Patron Saint of Open Source, as if decades of digital trench warfare never happened. It’s like watching Che Guevara and Milton Friedman split a dessert sampler and talk cloud strategy.
Mark Russinovich, playing the role of High Priest of Corporate Reconciliation, quipped “no major kernel decisions were made.” But let’s not kid ourselves, this wasn’t just dinner. This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair. Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.” The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”
What we witnessed was not diplomacy, it was absorption. The rebel king has been invited into the palace, offered wine, and handed a commemorative hoodie with the Microsoft logo stitched in ethically-sourced irony. Forget forks and pull requests; this is the final merge. Linux has breached the 4% desktop market share, and capitalism has responded the only way it knows how: by smiling, shaking hands, and quietly buying the table. Welcome to the Conference at Redmond. Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.
Where does Richard Stallman fit into this?
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)
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.
Thinking freely and imagining freely in our world is considered harmful.
The guy you’re answering is literally blaming Stallman for opinions in the domain of philosophy expressed in words.
There are so many fucking worse things happening very close to them every day by people far less intelligent than Stallman, yet that’s fine. But if the guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.
It’s an excuse.
But if the guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.
They might mean that, but they didn’t say it. I don’t think they did mean it. I think they just don’t want people to forget the “problematic” aspects of someone before we go all worship mode on him.
It’s like how my partner will interject–he’s canadian!–if I mention some actor. Like she just doesn’t want me to forget that context, but other than that, I can carry on.
Maybe they did mean that, though and I’m missing some context from somewhere else in this thread.
Stallman is certainly crazy I think… and creepy.
When have you stopped beating your wife ?
???
Stallman was right. Too bad nobody listens.
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.
This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair.
Linux people have forgotten, but “the bazaar” is not Windows. It’s old Unices and BSDs. Say, Solaris and FreeBSD.
Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.”
That forgives your sins.
The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”
I felt that line.
Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.
I (proverbially) weep because there were 4 people at that dinner, and you didn’t even mention the guy who made VMS.
I may frame this. Poetry.
Here is the historical picture to go along with it
Insert, “nobody asked.gif”
Dunno, I actually like how this reads. It doesn’t explain on which specific points and to which ends he argued, and MS monopoly is a bad thing. But if I were defending a position, I’d do the same. If not to stall and disorganize, then to avoid being caught on unfortunate words.
He’s very legally literate, I’d expect, so such things are where it’d do us good to learn from him.
Like for Troy you’d do well to learn from Greeks who actually won, not from Troyans who lost. No matter where your sympathies lie.
This is like seeing a picture of Gandalf and Saruman together lmao
Obviously 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.
Reverse Saruman, the money he donated made him look white.
Top comment on that page is perfect:
One wrote their own operating system incorporating others ideas on operating systems, the other’s mom bought theirs.
Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It’s a part of the GNU/Linux OS ;)
The kernel is the OS though.
Is 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
Then where do you draw the line?
The vast majority of people also don’t interact with the GNU tools at all, so GNU/Linux isn’t the OS either. KDE would be, or perhaps the distro itself. I’m not sure I’d call the OS GNU/Linux/Ubuntu/KDE. At that point might as well throw in firefox, for many it’s pretty much all the interaction they have with the computer.
Or what about the distros that don’t use the GNU coreutils? They are generally still called linux and still get to run apps made for linux, even with no traces of GNU.
I made that comment in slight jest. But anyway using non GNU OS still is consistent with my viewpoint that you don’t operate the kernel per se. The kernel sits at a layer below what the user operates.
As for the argument of apps being made for Linux, it is nothing more than just a semantic shortcut to the common ground between all these independent OS
… or as I have taken recently to call it, GNU plus Linux.
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.
But but but… my parents stories about self-made, and cheapskate, and he’s rich cause apparently he’s not frivolous, and wears sweatpants, and other dumbass lies they ate up…
I know it’s fun to bash on Gates, but it’s also bullshit. Dave Cutler worked on at least two major operating systems. He’s way up there in the Hall of Fame.
Someone, a big turd, a turd, and someone
Linus looks old now 😭
I guess that’s how time works but still…
I said in another thread about this, he looks like an older Tom Scott.
About that, Tom Scott is also old now.
That’s why I said older.
But yeah … Sad truths.
Down to the red shirt.
And hoodie!
Too bad Steve Wozniak wasn’t there too lol
