News Long-time rivals Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time, have dinner — 'No major kernel decisions were made, but maybe next dinner

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For those who didn't know: Dave Cutler was head of the team at Microsoft who developed the Windows NT kernel, which is the foundation for MS-Windows today. Before that he had worked on VMS at DEC.

IMHO, getting kernel heavyweights Linus and Dave together is a bigger deal than Linus and Bill Gates meeting.
 
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Findecanor said:
For those who didn't know: Dave Cutler was head of the team at Microsoft who developed the Windows NT kernel, which is the foundation for MS-Windows today. Before that he had worked on VMS at DEC.

IMHO, getting kernel heavyweights Linus and Dave together is a bigger deal than Linus and Bill Gates meeting.
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You beat me to it 😉

Just what I wanted to say, too!

WNT = V++M++S++ has always been a source of rumours about just how much Windows NT was in fact VMS in new clothes.

But then WNT 4 went against what I'd say was one of Dave Cutlers main principles and had drivers run in kernel mode, rather than a less privileged mode to support GUI on VGA with reasonable performance. NT 3 and 3.5 had them run outside ring 0 and thus could survive a broken driver much better.

Down went the VMS stability because now some deskjet printer driver would bring down a multi-user terminal server because it wasn't thread-safe and dual CPU x86 became a thing.
 
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abufrejoval said:
WNT = V++M++S++ has always been a source of rumours about just how much Windows NT was in fact VMS in new clothes.
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Oh, I've never considered that.
There is the same relationship between "IBM." and "HAL.".

The story about IBM and HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's movie+book "2001 - a Space Odyssey" is a bit peculiar.
In the movie, the misbehaving HAL computer had been made at the "HAL factory" in Urbana-Campaign.
In the real world, at the University at Urbana-Campaign, there used to be a tradition among engineering students to name their projects "HAL", the joke being to "one-up IBM".
IBM had product-placement in the movie, so they were a little annoyed when the movie came out.
A company formed by alumni was named "HAL Communications", and received many prank calls after the movie.
Arthur C. Clarke claimed ignorance to the whole naming debacle, saying it was all a coincidence.
 
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Findecanor said:
Oh, I've never considered that.
There is the same relationship between "IBM." and "HAL.".

The story about IBM and HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's movie+book "2001 - a Space Odyssey" is a bit peculiar.
In the movie, the misbehaving HAL computer had been made at the "HAL factory" in Urbana-Campaign.
In the real world, at the University at Urbana-Campaign, there used to be a tradition among engineering students to name their projects "HAL", the joke being to "one-up IBM".
IBM had product-placement in the movie, so they were a little annoyed when the movie came out.
A company formed by alumni was named "HAL Communications", and received many prank calls after the movie.
Arthur C. Clarke claimed ignorance to the whole naming debacle, saying it was all a coincidence.
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Oh that’s funny.
 
First of them failed at creating good server OS, and second good Desktop one. So the third guy is still clearly missing here.
 
Stomx said:
First of them failed at creating good server OS, and second good Desktop one. So the third guy is still clearly missing here.
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I'm not aware that Bill Gates ever created any OS, not even DOS. AFAIK he never graduated beyond BASIC interpreters.

And Linus wasn't into desktops, but multi-tasking kernels. His first sucked really bad, using Intel hardware task state segments for process switching, which was terrible, but today everbody else's kernels perform much worse.

But I appreciate you're trying to make a joke.

So what could be the third?

A mobile OS? Or an OS that actually doesn't think it's God but is happy to be distributed, social and still loyal to the owner(s) instead of the vendor?

Yeah, still missing!
 
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The article said:
Torvalds has a reputation for being a tech industry firebrand. In contrast with Gates’ take on AI, he considers it to be “90% marketing.” He also doesn’t seem to care about inflicting friendly fire damage on members of the Linux community, recently publicly raging against the “random turd files” he found in Linux 6.15-rc1.
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I think that's not fair. Linus speaks his mind and doesn't waste time or energy on sugar coating his message, when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts business of maintaining the huge undertaking that is the Linux Kernel. However, I haven't seen him be vindictive or nasty just for the sake of being mean or as a power move.

Bill Gates is also very direct and plain-spoken, though I think Bill has a fierce competitive streak I haven't noticed in Linus.

The author also probably should've mentioned that Microsoft has had an official Linux distro (now called Azure Linux), since about 5 years ago. Oh, how times have changed!

BTW, it was really Steve Ballmer who put Linux in the crosshairs and it was really Microsoft that targeted Linux. Linux, itself, wasn't ever really anti-Microsoft, it was just doing its own thing. Sure, some of Microsoft's competitors have jumped on the Linux bandwagon, along the way, but Linux never defined or constrained itself to being anti-Microsoft.

P.S. I know Linus lives in the Pacific Northwest, though I forget exactly where. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't live all that far from Bill Gates.
 
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Oh, and I'd be pretty shocked if they got into any ideological discussions about software or anything else. Perhaps some technical anecdotes were shared, but I'm sure all present are mature enough not to sour the mood by making some screed or voicing a position others would likely challenge. Plus, they're all smart enough to know that doing so would have no upside.

I'd bet the overall tenor was more that of some old men sharing war stories than having any vigorous debates over anything but the most trivial sorts of subjects.
 
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The "Year Of Linux" won't arrive until a significant percentage of people can sit down at a Linux machine and use all the software they need the way they can with Windows and Mac. It's getting there, gaming focused machines will be the first, but it's still a long way off.
 
bit_user said:
I don't know why people still even talk about it like it's going to be some sort of overnight revolution. It won't be. In the best case scenario, Linux usage will simply continue to increase and it'll get more accessible, but I don't foresee a "tipping point".
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Most people don't, it's just publications with liberal use of hyperbole. That being said this year with the "Win 10 Apocalypse" there hasn't been another point like this since Windows XP went EOL when a vast number of machines would have to be replaced due to not meeting Windows 11's requirements (basically TPM 2.0), but I don't see any Linux distro currently at the point, if anything Apple is closer and would be significantly less expensive using sub-$500 Mac Minis and existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
 
bit_user said:
I think that's not fair. Linus speaks his mind and doesn't waste time or energy on sugar coating his message, when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts business of maintaining the huge undertaking that is the Linux Kernel. However, I haven't seen him be vindictive or nasty just for the sake of being mean or as a power move.
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I've always argued that Linus Torvalds' best quality is decision making, not his ability to code.

One of the first decision he made was to recognize that his code was shit compared to the improvements others, who actually knew a thing or two about computer hardware and operating systems, were making.

So he stood back and created a new brand of social code around Linux, which is one of the major reasons it won out aginst the competition, often less for technical merits than for the speed and quality of code evolution that was set free via that social framework.

Compare that to Bill and Lynne Jolitz, who were great but couldn't scale.
bit_user said:
Bill Gates is also very direct and plain-spoken, though I think Bill has a fierce competitive streak I haven't noticed in Linus.
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Yep, he knows he has a thing or two he has to make up for before meeting his maker.

Most current billionaires seem to lack that conscience add-on or consider it optional.
 
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abufrejoval said:
So what could be the third?

A mobile OS? Or an OS that actually doesn't think it's God but is happy to be distributed, social and still loyal to the owner(s) instead of the vendor?

Yeah, still missing!
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Actually just remembered that Andrew Tannenbaum was in the game, very early on.
And also having a fight or two with Linus.

And he even got into every PC into a while, beating both Windows and Linux on every boot and hiding under both via Minix in the service processor.

But I was thinking more L4, QNX, Plan 9, Mach, AX, Chorus and all those others cool and distributed operating systems.
 
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