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Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

gnuhaut@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

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FreeWilliam@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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”.

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rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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GrammarPolice@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Insert, “nobody asked.gif”

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interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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- Jankatarch@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Where does Richard Stallman fit into this?
  
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  - interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.”
    
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    mad_lentil@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Do you have like a blog or something? Good bit of writing, this.
    
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    GeneralVincent@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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)
    
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    Ironfist79@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Stallman was right. Too bad nobody listens.
    
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- bobo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I may frame this. Poetry.
  
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  - interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Here is the historical picture to go along with it Image
    
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interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What else would you expect from the “dictator for life”, that he would have the social skills NOT to attend “Conference at Redmond” ?

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