To know whether it was the right decision or wrong decision would require knowledge of Torvalds decision making framework.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
<i>I take a guess and predict that many of us mortals would have taken a chance.</i><p>This is the worst lead sentence from any article I have seen on HN.
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...
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.
the other reason, cited in the wired article that it seems this was based from here <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/mr-linux/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/mr-linux/</a>, is that Linus also didn't like the Mach kernel.<p>The relevant paragraphs are here:<p>"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.<p>“I said no,” Torvalds remembers."
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Remember the photos from apple's icloud datacenters last year? All linux, and linux powered appliances. Like the gigantic TerraData Extreme Appliances.
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.