Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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'.

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.

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.

Uh, no.

Jobs already had a Mach kernel, with a BSD user layer. And that's what they kept. I don't think Linux was ever seriously considered. NeXT's OS made heavy use of Mach messaging, and other features, that would be missing in Linux.

The original article says the offer happened in 2000, which would be kinda late to be changing the OS X kernel so dramatically.

And why would he need Linus to do a kernel when he had Avie Tevanian, from the Mach project and NeXT? Linus isn't the only "kernel guy".

Exactly, NEXTStep was already employing a mach kernel with the BSD user space.

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

Actually I'd think that he would get completely the same job as he has right now, except that works on Darwin instead of Linux and that he gets more money. However, it's quite understandable that he declined, because he'd never leave the project he himself started and saw grow.

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

Trying to hire both wasn't an option?

of course there's value in hiring Linus that's why Steve tried to hire him.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com