Linus Torvalds Photographed with Bill Gates - for the First Time Ever

"The worlds of Linux and Windows finally came together in real life..." writes The Verge: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, have surprisingly never met before. That all changed at a recent dinner hosted by Sysinternals creator Mark Russinovich... "No major kernel decisions were made," jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
More from the Linux news blog Linuxiac: The man on the left is Mark Russinovich, a software engineer, author, and co-founder of Sysinternals, now CTO of Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform. He has become synonymous with deep Windows diagnostics and cloud-scale management. In the late 1990s, his suite of tools (Process Explorer, Autoruns, Procmon) revolutionized the way administrators and security professionals understood Windows internals.

The man on the far right is another living legend: Dave Cutler. Let me put it this way — he's one of the key people behind OpenVMS and the brilliant lead architect who designed Windows NT's kernel and hardware-abstraction layer — technologies that remain at the heart of every current Windows release, from server farms to laptops. So, it's no surprise that people often call him the "father of Windows NT."

"Linux is a Cancer"

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

-- Steve Ballmer

Re:"Linux is a Cancer"

[johnjones]

I wonder if Bill Gates giving away his money has the same satisfaction as Linus Torvalds knowing he made the world a better place

History will show which one actually gets remembered as a good person and my bet is on Linus

Lesson I learnt... chasing money ends poorly.

JJ

Re:

[stooo]

it didn't end poorly. Bill had a full life. He finally could met Linus :)

Re:

[thegarbz]

History will show which one actually gets remembered as a good person and my bet is on Linus

Good people? Why do you arbitrarily label people with a single binary value? Let's look at some examples: Bill Gates ran a company that destroyed competitors illegally. BAD!!! Linux created an open source operating system. GOOD!!! Or we can flip it. Bill Gates developed products that brought computers out of the hands of the techy nerds and into the masses. GOOD!!! Linus oversaw a development in an incredibly toxic environment, often childishly berated people to the point of quitting like the worlds worst m

Could this be the year...

[greytree]

Of photos of Linus on Bill Gates' Desktop ?

And nearly all developers say ...

[drnb]

And nearly all developers, Windows or Linux, say "so what, famous dev meets famous dev; did someone image we dislike other devs who work on competing projects?"

Only a handful of zealots get all religious about their software. Most of us subscribe to different tools for different jobs. We respect each other as developers, whether we call Win32 or POSIX makes little difference. Build something that works, respect.

Re:

[drnb]

I'll NEVER respect bill gates he is the most corrupt evil bastard in high tech, and MS Windows is a shit tier operating system

OK, you are in the religious minority.

Re:

[sg_oneill]

I'll NEVER respect bill gates he is the most corrupt evil bastard in high tech, and MS Windows is a shit tier operating system

"Evil" is a strangely heated term to throw around. The guy has been out of the tech industry for a couple of decades now, and focuses on..... well doing good...... so, you don't have to enjoy windows, I sure don't, unix forever, but try not make your product choices your entire personality, thats a terrible way to live.

Re:

[diffract]

>and focuses on..... well doing good
are you sure about that? investing in the covid vaccine then shitting on it after selling your shares doesn't give a good vibe. so does spreading injections through mosquito farms

Re:

[Uldis Segliņš]

Looks like you have no clue how investing works. It is not like he is saying - make me an evil substance, muahahahaa! I pretty strongly dislike Windows, but his business acumen has been pretty solid. Including his investments. He chooses big things both as humanitys needs and potential. And selling shares is nothing bad, not like he sells them just before announcing something ridiculous on twitters and liessocial.

Re: And nearly all developers say ...

[subie]

Found one

More Interestingly Torvalds and Cutler

[simpz]

Have the famous Linux kernel lead and the NT/XP/Win server kernel lead ever met.. ?

Pretty sure Cutler used to have some harsh wordscabout Unix in the past

Re:More Interestingly Torvalds and Cutler

[Cyberax]

And he was absolutely right. NT was better than Unix at that time. NT was Unicode-first, async from the start, with a pluggable modular kernel, and fine-grained SMP support (NT never had a Big Kernel Lock). Linux really only got to that level by mid 2000-s.

Re: More Interestingly Torvalds and Cutler

[simlox]

Unicode first! Allready there you said it was crap! Stick to ASCII except for the presentation layer. Stop the crap with 16 bit characters in strings. Same as using seconds since 1970 is the most robust time keeping solution (except we don't, as Unix time follows UTC, not TAC.)

Re:

[ald_a]

Yet, you had to restart NT to change its IP address.

Re:

[thegarbz]

False. Windows NT prompted the user to restart to get the software running on the system to be in a sane state should it not cope with a changing IP address. But if you declined at the prompted dialogue box the IP address changed anyway and the system ran just fine.

They both look pretty happy

[leonbev]

They both look pretty content in that picture. Makes sense... Bill G got control of most of the world's laptops and desktops, while Linus got control of most of the world's servers and smartphones. It's almost like they decided to spilt the entire IT ecosystem in two, and also decided to keep Apple around for sport.

Re:

[Tablizer]

decided to keep Apple around for sport.

Not sport, but for talking down anti-trust lawsuits, as in "we are not a monopoly, Mac also does desktop".

Torvalds is a CS God. Cutler is a CS God.

[ChesterRafoon]

That is all.

Re: Torvalds is a CS God. Cutler is a CS God.

[subie]

Boring

Not even a middle finger

[OrangeTide]

Torvalds posed for the camera [arstechnica.com] when questioned about NVIDIA. I'm pretty sure I recognize one NV employee in the front row too (on the far right? I'll have to ask her next time I see her, even though it was a decade ago)

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

To be fair, that was 13 years ago.

Re:

[stooo]

Not following the driver story, but it seems that that particular middle finger is still somewhat relevant today.

The trees cried

[Tablizer]

The Gates of Mordor opened up. (The door gates, not Bill.)

By the way, why does Bill look like he's wearing an Ed Sullivan body suit?

New Threats

[bug_hunter]

Microsoft was (very deservedly) the big bad of Season 1.

Then Oracle had a few swings in Season 2, but they never had the same vibe.

Now we're in season 10 - the power scaling of the villans is getting a bit unrealistic if you ask me.

I see a Frozen joke here

[TheMiddleRoad]

Anybody? Anybody?

Re: Where are all the..

[subie]

What does that have to do with the article?

Darn! Another theory blown out of the water

[93 Escort Wagon]

And, all this time, I was absolutely certain Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds where the same person...

Wild guess

[sentiblue]

I'm gonna guess that the Windows OS will integrate the Linux kernel as the core of its OS, eliminating the type of catastrophes similar to Crowdstrike which was forced into their mouth by European regulators. Torvald will work for MS running the WSL unit, which eventually will become Windows.

We want Linux on the Desktop.

[stooo]

it's about time.
WSL is not enough. We want Linux on the Desktop.

Re:

[Uldis Segliņš]

And what exactly is holding you back?

CUTLER is a thief

[gavron]

Dave Cutler STOLE VMS from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

When found guilty of "transferring" that tech to Microsoft for W/NT Microsoft agreed to put out Alpha/AXP chips for DEC and associated software.

Dave's no hero. He's a thief. Too many links, so google away.

Even W/NT was designed to be one letter above VMS, just like Space Oddyssey's HAL was one step away from IBM.

VMS was awesome but Dave Cutler (who helped develop v4 not v5) never understood it fully. Add in Bill Gates wanting everything WFW 3