Technology

What category would he be eligible for?

• Nobel Prize in physics
• Nobel Prize in chemistry
• Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine
• Nobel Prize in literature
• Nobel Peace Prize
• The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Heh, you think there'll be people to remember things in 300 years?

Reverse Saruman, the money he donated made him look white.

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.

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.

I completely agree with you. I can't believe 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 contributors that started, spread, and work on free software that include BIOS and full on operating systems with a developer team consisting of a few contributors 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, governments, 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 corporate 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.

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.

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.

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.

You receive: Windows 95 theme on Xubuntu.