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.Of course, just a year later, Apple released OS X, the next version of their Mac operating system that is still in use today. It seems pretty clear in hindsight that Jobs wanted Linus to head the OS X team, but if there’s one thing Torvalds is, it’s idealistic. Imagine what OS X might be today if he had joined, though!

« The 2012 Apple TV Is More Than Just A Speed Bump [Review] Windows 8 Will Support Retina Display Tablets Just Like The iPad »