
Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple - jhack
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-linux-linus-tovalds-steve-jobs,15082.html
======
fleitz
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 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.

~~~
robot
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'.

~~~
stevejohnson
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.

~~~
stevejohnson
To whoever downvoted: I actually have read "Just For Fun" in its entirety, and
that comment was in fact my honest assessment of what I read in that text. If
you want me to come back in a couple of hours with a citation, fine.

Jobs tried to recruit Linus _after_ NeXTSTEP was already an established OS.

------
DHowett
Not working for Apple is possibly the best decision Linus could have made. One
can argue that Linux would have kept moving forward without him, but it's
really a shame when great talent leaves the open-source community. The man
might be opinionated, and some might not like him, but where would we be
without his continued contribution?

~~~
dhimes
_Not working for Apple is possibly the best decision Linus could have made_...

... for us

------
dfc
_I take a guess and predict that many of us mortals would have taken a
chance._

This is the worst lead sentence from any article I have seen on HN.

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jkuria
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...

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

~~~
veyron
There's clear value-add here: for some reason, I couldn't find a discussion
surrounding the Wired article.

The real reason why the trend is pervasive is because oftentimes one article
from one source doesn't reach all corners of the internet. Middlemen cascade
the messages.

------
sytelus
Considering 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.

------
kamechan
the other reason, cited in the wired article that it seems this was based from
here <http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/mr-linux/>, is that Linus
also didn't like the Mach kernel.

The relevant paragraphs are here:

"Torvalds has never met Bill Gates, but around 2000, when he was still working
at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple’s Cupertino campus
and tried to hire him. “Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch,”
says Torvalds. The condition: He’d have to drop Linux development. “He wanted
me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things,” he said. That was a non-starter
for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS’s Mach kernel.

“I said no,” Torvalds remembers."

------
kaushiks
For the interested reader - Linus' book "Just for fun" has a pretty detailed
account of his meeting with Steve Jobs.

------
dfc
Who is surprised by this "revelation"? The only less surprising thing would be
Theo or RMS saying no...

~~~
olalonde
I had to wikipedia Theo (founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt>

~~~
beatle
ROFL I remember this.

BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being
that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge
proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux
operating system.

"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize
how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it
rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

[http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-
cz_dl_0616th...](http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-
cz_dl_0616theo.html)

~~~
koeselitz
From that article:

 _Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is "difficult" and declined to comment
further._

Ha!

------
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.

------
syncopate
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.

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

------
mathnode
Remember the photos from apple's icloud datacenters last year? All linux, and
linux powered appliances. Like the gigantic TerraData Extreme Appliances.

------
bni
I read this "news" on slashdot 10 years ago. Also remember reading about
Torvalds interviewig for, but declining to work at Sun, which also in
hindsight was a very good decision.

------
ootachi
That was a dumb decision on Linus' part. Apple is the future; Linux is the
past.

~~~
param
Way too broad a statement. Linux is clearly a future for a large segment of
users, same as OSX.

Actually, let me take that back - with the new 'post PC' world coming where
only techies will have laptops, Linux has a greater future. OSX will fade
because all hipsters will just have iOS devices

~~~
rimantas
You may be underestimating the number of techies liking OS X.

~~~
fidotron
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.

~~~
NathanKP
I have to agree because I like Snow Leopard better than Lion and have not made
the switch yet because of that. However I don't think this is a sign that OS X
is endemic. I still have hope that Lion is just an ill planned stop on the OS
X progression.

~~~
caf
endemic - I do not think it means what you think it means.

