Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time.
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
Mommy was one of the higher ups at IBM. Gates got most of it just handed to him. They are not the same.
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 bet my hand to the fire that Bill Gates didn't eat avocado toast and made coffee at home and that's why he is a billionaire today.
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.
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.
Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It's a part of the GNU/Linux OS ;)
... or as I have taken recently to call it, GNU plus Linux.
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
Of course you don’t operate the kernel, but the kernel operates the system.
My point is that there are many layers between the kernel and user and which you interact with depends on the person. The only common point between all these, at least for linux, is the linux kernel itself.
I get that the “axchually GNU/linux” is just a joke, but considering how much impact linux has versus GNU, it’s totally fine to omit it. You can totally just use busybox instead and you’re still using a Linux OS.