Who is surprised by this "revelation"? The only less surprising thing would be Theo or RMS saying no...
Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#22To know whether it was the right decision or wrong decision would require knowledge of Torvalds decision making framework.
Clearly, the personal offer from Jobs himself makes it apparent that both sides knew that money was not the motivating factor for Linus otherwise a guy in a suit with a briefcase full of cash would have sufficed and a personal call would have been unnecessary.
I'm not sure what the veneration about working at Apple is all about, it's a company, you give them your time, they give you some money. Big deal. If one wants to work at a company that makes products used by billions of people I'd suggest a ball bearing factory.
The reality of working at a company with 10,000 engineers is that you'll probably spend your time writing the perfect unit test for the checkbox on the reminder app. If you really want to be the next Steve Wozniak you're going to have to start in your garage.
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#23sneaky how he rips off the wired article by saying "apparently...this and that..". We are seeing too much of this kind of journalism lately. You see a catchy article somewhere then rewrite it by saying "so and so reported this. Apparently they found out that...
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be underestimating the number of techies liking OS X.
I think the problem is a lot of techies like OS X now, but not the way it's headed. Lion is enough to make me switch away, and I've been on OS X for a very long time. What's keeping OS X popular now is not its own merits, but that the alternatives are even worse.
Mind if I ask what you don't like? I upgraded a few months ago, and while I had to turn a few annoying bits off, it's overall much better than Snow Leopard.
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#25For the interested reader - Linus' book "Just for fun" has a pretty detailed account of his meeting with Steve Jobs.
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#26Considering Job's obsession to build closed systems that goes far beyond just "closed source" this should have been a trivial decision for Linus. As described in the book, Job even insisted to use non-standard screws so owners and hackers couldn't open the box using standard tools.
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#27Who is surprised by this "revelation"? The only less surprising thing would be Theo or RMS saying no...
I had to wikipedia Theo (founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is a lot of techies like OS X now, but not the way it's headed. Lion is enough to make me switch away, and I've been on OS X for a very long time. What's keeping OS X popular now is not its own merits, but that the alternatives are even worse.
Mind if I ask what you don't like? I upgraded a few months ago, and while I had to turn a few annoying bits off, it's overall much better than Snow Leopard.
It's 99% that I hate (and I don't use that lightly) them screwing up Expose (to me this was the OS X killer feature on laptops) and the changes in scrolling. 1% is the unwelcome increase in skeuomorphism.
Generally I don't get on with iOS either, so iOSification is a trend I'm not into. I accept that may not be a popular opinion, but there we are.
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was a dumb decision on Linus' part. Apple is the future; Linux is the past. This sounds so familiar; where have I heard it before. Oh yeah, it's what the MS fanboys were saying ten years ago :) Not that I'm anywhere near Linus' capabilities, but I would turn down a job offer from Apple too. I don't much fancy working for evil.
how's apple any more "evil" than any other big company (google included)?
For one, the other companies have other redeeming features: Microsoft has MSR, Google also does some research as well as a lot of open source stuff and IBM also does good research. Even Facebook contributes more to the community at large and the state of the art, as far as I know. All that Apple does is mostly produce overrated products in secrecy.
Apple is also very anti-freedom in the GNU sense, and have horrible policies on iOS and their app store. They really treat developers working on their platform poorly, and actively work against letting their customers have alternatives. (Jailbreaking shouldn't even be necessary!)
However, the really worst thing is how popular they are. Their draconian policies on iOS have pushed other companies--like Microsoft--to emulate that on their own problems; as far as I know, Windows Phone is almost as locked down as iOS. So Apple is at a weird confluence of evil and popular support, which is much more dangerous than evil by itself (this is why they are more worrisome than e.g. Oracle or even Microsoft). Their worst effect is cultural--making the nonsense around third-party iOS programs seem reasonable.
If Linux dominated the market, you would be free to use it however you like. If iOS dominated the market, you'd have to play by Apple's rules--getting a developer account, going through their review process... And even OS X is going in this direction--you have to deal with Apple to get your code signed, and there are no alternatives.
In a lot of ways, Apple is worse than Microsoft in its heyday; their only saving grace is their small market share--thankfully, Apple does not enjoy a monopoly anywhere or even a large share of the desktop market. Still, ignoring scale, they really are worse than Microsoft was; the scale is the reason they get away with all the things Microsoft couldn't (like standard web browsers or music players).
Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple
#30That was a dumb decision on Linus' part. Apple is the future; Linux is the past.
Probably over 80% of shiny content that users consume on Apple devices is served by Linux servers. Ever heard of that little thing called cloud ? It's powered by Linux for the most part. By making operating system a commodity Linux changed computer industry forever, and it's not going anywhere. Don't underestimate it.
nit: a big chunk of the web is powered by FreeBSD.