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Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

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Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#51

Post by nknight »

beatle wrote: post #40
fleitz wrote: post #22

To 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 abo…

Linus doesn't have any experience with microkernels and BSD. Jordan Hubbard was a better hire in retrospect.

The "OS X uses a microkernel" myth needs to die. OS X's kernel, XNU, is based on a pre-3.0 version of Mach, which wasn't much of a microkernel to begin with, and neither Apple nor NeXT before it used Mach as a microkernel. You can't even realistically portray it as a hybrid.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#52

Post by repsilat »

jkuria wrote: post #23

sneaky 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...

Yeah, it's pretty thin. The title could be changed to, "Toms Hardware writer reads a Wired article from two days ago". There's no new content of substance, and even the link to the interview is difficult to find. Just terrible.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#53

Post by koeselitz »

The remarkable thing about this story to me isn't that Linus turned this down - that seems like an obvious move, frankly, considering Linus' goals and aspirations and the kind of work he's sought out in the past.

The remarkable thing is - why would Steve Jobs offer Linus Torvalds a job? I mean, Steve Jobs was highly intelligent, and he clearly knew that Linus is a top-notch computing mind. But I feel like Steve has a much more focused idea of what he wants from Apple than that. He never ran Apple like it was Google; it never seemed to be his goal to gather an amalgamation of really intelligent people and encourage them to pursue their interests in the hopes of seeing what came out. Apple is a much more focused company than that, isn't it? I mean, Apple seems to have very high standards for who they hire - but those standards include more than just intelligence. It's a company that works toward fixed conceptual goals.

It just doesn't seem like Linus could ever have fit in with Apple culture, and I have a hard time believing that Steve didn't realize that. Maybe it wasn't as well-known yet how irascible Linus can be; or maybe Steve's notion of the culture of Apple hadn't really become as focused and solidified yet, since he'd only returned to Apple three years before.

Either way, as a die-hard Linux guy (albeit one with an iPhone and an iPad) I have to say that I cannot for the life of me imagine Linus Torvalds hacking away at a super-secret iOS subsystem or realigning the internals of the Lion OS or anything like that. I think we know now that Steve Jobs already knew by 2000 that those things were to come - so I wonder how he felt about Linus being part of that.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#54

Post by robot »

fleitz wrote: post #22

To 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 abo…

If you read the book called 'Just for fun' by torvalds, you will find some details of this conversation.

Jobs had to replace the notoriously old Mac OS design, with a new kernel. He had linux and BSD as the base kernels in mind. He offered the job to Torvalds to base the new OS on Linux. Linus, though did not want to build a closed source system, no matter what was offered. So he declined. Then Jobs had to base the new OS on BSD and hired a large group of FreeBSD developers.

The kernel was just 'one' of the many parts that Jobs needed, albeit a complex one. He was more focusing on creating something 'greater than the sum of its parts'.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#55

Post by astrodust »

jkuria wrote: post #23

sneaky 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...

Apparently this article rips off the Wired article and that's the unfortunate trend in reporting these days.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#56

Post by astrodust »

syncopate wrote: post #37

Anyone remember Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of the FreeBSD project? He joined Apple around that time. I am not really sure how he compares to Linus but working for Apple does not go well with wanting to be a public person.

Yeah, that Guy Kawasaki person, never heard of him. Who's Jean Louis Gassée? Jonathan Ive? All just faceless employees.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#57

Post by stevejohnson »

robot wrote: post #54
fleitz wrote: post #22

To 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 abo…

If you read the book called 'Just for fun' by torvalds, you will find some details of this conversation. Jobs had to replace the notoriously old Mac OS design, with a new kernel. He had linux and BSD as the base kernels in mind. He offered the job to Torvalds to base the new OS on Linux. Linus, though did not want to build a closed source system, no matter what was offered. So he declined. Then Jobs had to base the n…

That's not how I read it. Jobs never had the BSD or Linux kernels in mind, he just wanted Linus to somehow "get all the open source people to like Apple" and stop maintaining a separate ecosystem.

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#58

Post by codehalo »

Danieru wrote: post #46
tikhonj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

To be fair apple's CUPS is pretty critical for printing under linux. And then there is webkit.

Apple bought CUPS

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#59

Post by veyron »

Produce wrote: post #35
fleitz wrote: post #22

To 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 abo…

To be fair, I think the veneration is more about working at a company which makes products which are in millions of peoples' conscious minds. Nobody pays attention to ball bearings. Why are we talking about ball bearings? Oooh look, an iPad!

The article clearly states that the conversation happened before ip{o,a}d

Re: Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

#60

Post by alrs »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #30
azov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is no longer the case, from my reading.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-bsd/all/all

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