This sounds like generic geek pride to me. One thing Steve Jobs was not is a "money grubbing greedmonger." Tovalds is more like Steve Jobs than you will ever realize.
No, $7 BILLION rich with no known charitable donations and outsourcing US jobs to China while not lowering prices for the consume = definitely NOT a money grubbing greedmonger.
We're not talking about financial security here. We're talking about enough money to own a small air-force to protect your own little island in the Bahamas. Company wise, we're talking about no dividends (until now after Steve is gone) and cash hoarding enough money to almost purchase Greece. Yeah, Jobs and Apple aren't greedy at all.
No, this doesn't prove anything. Where was money even discussed in that bit about the Apple offer? See, to "prove" this, wouldn't Steve have to had offered Linus like a billion dollars or something?
Yeah, you need to be offered like a "Billion" dollars to be considered a greedy person.
Linus Torvalds started an open-source FREE operating system and people on here are trying to make him out to be the greedy one? Right. I'd like to know what is being smoked and where I can get some.
Geeze, you'd think greedy people would be all like "Greed is good!" rather than try to prove there was no greed going on there.
Please don't take it personal. I've seen video of Linus and he just bugs me, that's it.
It's not like I know the guy on a personal level or anything. I just respect the idea of free information. I've done a LOT of work myself for free in return. So the idea of charging for the air to breathe if you can get away with it bugs me more than any personal idiosyncrasies. Obviously, some people have different values than me, which is why I mention the 'greed is good' mantra that I would have expected instead. It's simply not part of my belief system. Everyone wants to be comfortable, but if money was what was important to me, I would have become a lawyer. You can't take it with you, regardless. Steve made his family rich and a lot of shareholders rich. I'm sure they love him to death. But heck, even Bill Gates has shown some concern for others in this world that weren't so well off and perhaps never got a chance, being born where they were, etc. I never saw ANY indication Mr. Jobs gave a flying crap about anybody but himself or his immediate family.
Steve Jobs was an ass, no question about it. But he wasn't "money grubbing greedmonger". His wealth came primarily from his ownership of Pixar (later Disney). He bought the company and pumped millions of his own money in to it. When they became uber-succesfull, the value of his ownership shot through the roof. And there's nothing wrong with that. Should he have ran Pixar to the ground, so the value of his shares would go down?
My opinion of Steve Jobs has nothing to do with how he got his wealth initially, but what he did with it after he got it and how he ran Apple (moving jobs overseas and not so much as passing a small part of the profit savings onto the consumer (i.e. Macs didn't drop in price after moving production to China; you could argue that iOS devices would cost MORE if they were made over here, but as far as I can see my PowerMac cost less when it was made in the USA when it was made with relatively expensive PPC parts, whereas today's Macs using little more than off-the-shelf hardware for the most part and dirt cheap (by comparison to PPC) PC Clone tech costs a heck of a lot of dough by today's standards (the only expandable Mac STARTS at $2400? Holy Crap that's out of touch and it's in part due to the fact they don't cater to consumers, just their idea of what a consumer SHOULD want rather than what they DO want).
Then there's the charity thing (or rather the lack thereof and comments to the effect he's giving it all to his family). That spells greed to me, not "ass". I actually think the initial move to create a computer company in the garage was kind of cool and the fact they used money from an illegal phone blue box that much more ironic for their "sue 'em all" mentality in today's Apple.
Torvalds is not in it for the money. He already has all the money he needs, and he lives a comfortable but not extravagant lifestyle.
And that I can respect. I don't know if I'd want to hang out with the guy, but I haven't been talking about a popularity contest. For all I know, Jobs would have been far more fun to talk to; that doesn't mean I respected the guy ethically speaking.
