"Linus Torvalds Just Exposed Microsoft’s Biggest Linux Problem"

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Microsoft, same thing. They're claiming that they're uh trying to merge them in Windows 8.

[00:00:06]They're lying. They're not. They're full of >> I think from an OS perspective, they just suck. And from a morals perspective, they suck even more.

[00:00:18]>> Many of Microsoft's blunders are transparently embarrassing. Linus Torvalds has delivered a perspective on Microsoft that cuts through decades of corporate mythology with the precision of someone who watched every chapter of the story unfold from a front-row seat.

[00:00:33]While Microsoft positioned itself as the unchallenged ruler of personal computing and treated competitors with a contempt it rarely bothered to disguise, Linux was quietly doing something that no press release or product launch could replicate. It was building the infrastructure that the modern world actually runs on. The systems Microsoft publicly dismissed and privately feared have become the backbone of the internet, the foundation of cloud computing, and in one of the more striking ironies in technology history, critical component of Microsoft's own business survival. The dominance built on control and exclusivity turned out to be considerably more fragile than the dominance built on open collaboration and shared development. Torvalds watched this play out in real time, and his read on what it means for Microsoft is not the celebratory narrative the industry prefers to tell.

[00:01:24]>> Microsoft isn't out there to to make the world a better place.

[00:01:28]And maybe they shouldn't be out there to do that. [music] Um but I think they've been concentrating a little bit too much on just making money. Linus Torvalds >> Torvalds has described GitHub Copilot's relationship with open-source code using a term that is difficult to argue with once you sit with it. Strip mining.

[00:01:47]Developers across the world contributed code freely to open-source projects over decades, building a body of work that represented genuine collaborative effort at a scale the software industry had never seen before. Microsoft trained a commercial AI product on that collective work and began selling the output back to the same community that created the underlying material.

[00:02:05]The threat Linux always faced from Microsoft was never purely the hostility that Steve Ballmer made famous.

[00:02:12]The more sophisticated danger was the hospitality that followed.

[00:02:16]The embrace that came with its own set of terms that took years to become fully visible.

[00:02:21]>> One of the more interesting parts about Linux is how it turns out in the most unexpected places. So, when I started Linux, I needed a an operating system for my own use. And today, you find Linux everywhere. In 2001 >> collection of internal Microsoft communications made their way onto the internet and became known as the Halloween documents.

[00:02:43]What made them extraordinary was their candor.

[00:02:46]Microsoft engineers wrote internally that Linux was technically superior to Windows Server for specific workloads.

[00:02:52]They acknowledged that open source development was moving at a pace their internal teams could not consistently match.

[00:02:59]And they concluded that the threat was serious enough to require a formally designed strategic response.

[00:03:05]The strategy they developed had a name that has since become standard vocabulary in technology discussions.

[00:03:11]FUD, standing for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The plan was to make enterprise customers hesitant about Linux by raising questions about licensing complexity, suggesting exposure to patent risk, and implying that open source software carried legal dangers that responsible organizations should avoid.

[00:03:32]The goal was not to outperform Linux on merit.

[00:03:35]It was to make choosing Linux feel dangerous.

[00:03:37]>> territory. I want to make it very clear that Microsoft of the '90s and early 2000s acted very aggressively towards Linux. It was shown clearly in the Halloween documents that they were fearful of of adopting Linux and just as fearful of it happening on the desktop.

[00:03:54]And they allegedly funded research from the Gartner Group completely slamming Linux, saying that Linux would be dead with Windows 2000 Service Pack 1. Steve Ballmer went on >> Steve Ballmer took that internal strategy and delivered it publicly from a stage, describing Linux as a cancer in terms that left no ambiguity about Microsoft's official position.

[00:04:17]It was the public performance of a strategy that had been written in documents Microsoft fully expected to remain private.

[00:04:23]Linus Torvalds read those documents and responded that Microsoft was the real cancer in the situation.

[00:04:29]The technology press largely dismissed his response as the reaction of someone too emotionally invested in Linux to engage with the criticism objectively.

[00:04:38]They suggested he was bitter, paranoid, and unable to think clearly about a competitor.

[00:04:43]The subsequent 20 years of technological development have produced a fairly clear record of whose analysis was accurate.

[00:04:50]This technology allows you to expand into [music] many different niches. The thing that makes Linux interesting to me is all the interesting technology, but it's also all the people involved and working in an open-source projects where you >> [music] >> work with hundreds, potentially thousands of people, makes the whole technology even [music] more interesting. When Satya >> When Satya Nadella became Microsoft CEO in 2014, the company's public positioning on Linux reversed so completely that it could have been mistaken for a different organization.

[00:05:23]Microsoft began contributing code to the Linux kernel.

[00:05:26]Azure started running Linux workloads as a featured capability.

[00:05:30]The company launched a marketing campaign built around the phrase Microsoft loves Linux.

[00:05:35]And the technology press responded by declaring that the conflict was over, and that Nadella had fundamentally transformed the company's identity.

[00:05:44]In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion.

[00:05:49]GitHub was not simply a code hosting platform. It was the central infrastructure of global software development.

[00:05:56]The place where the open source community coordinated its work.

[00:06:00]Developers celebrated the acquisition.

[00:06:02]Open source communities expressed cautious optimism.

[00:06:05]>> But they're pushing AI in the Windows like there's no tomorrow. And I don't think that it gets better anytime soon.

[00:06:12]Windows 10 is end-of-life next year.

[00:06:14]Windows 11 gets all this controversial AI stuff, which they already had to limit due to security risks. And even if a Windows 12 is actually coming, it probably will be even worse in terms of privacy.

[00:06:25]>> Torvalds did not celebrate, and his reasoning was specific rather than reflexively skeptical.

[00:06:32]Companies operating at Microsoft scale make decisions based on strategic interest.

[00:06:37]And contributing to the Linux kernel while simultaneously selling Azure access to Linux workloads is a strategic decision that generates revenue and market expansion.

[00:06:47]The friendliness was genuine in its expression.

[00:06:50]The motivation behind it was survival and growth communicated in the language of shared values.

[00:06:55]The mechanism that made this possible is one that almost nobody explained clearly during the entire Microsoft loves Linux period. It operated quietly beneath the surface of the positive coverage, and once it becomes visible, the picture of what Microsoft was actually building during those years looks considerably different from the transformation narrative that dominated >> I see it. I genuinely believe that switching to Linux might be your best bet here, since not only is it completely free to use, but it's also open source and therefore very modular.

[00:07:26]For example, if a bigger distribution like Ubuntu decides to integrate AI features like Windows has, someone can fork it and remove all that stuff again.

[00:07:35]But luckily, we aren't even near that anyway. On Linux, you can still have your own local user, which doesn't need an online account like on Windows.

[00:07:43]Microsoft never needed to destroy Linux once the strategic landscape shifted in a direction that made destruction irrelevant to the actual objective.

[00:07:52]When cloud computing became the primary model for enterprise technology, the question that determined market power was no longer which operating system ran on individual machines. The question became who owned and controlled the layer that sat above the operating system.

[00:08:08]The infrastructure layer where the real commercial relationships were being built.

[00:08:12]Microsoft moved into that position with deliberate speed.

[00:08:16]Azure captured cloud infrastructure.

[00:08:18]GitHub captured the development workflow of the global software community.

[00:08:22]Teams embedded itself in corporate communication.

[00:08:25]Office 365 and Copilot extended Microsoft's presence into daily productivity at every level of the enterprise.

[00:08:32]Together, these products form a control layer that operates above whatever operating system happens to be running underneath them.

[00:08:39]Whether that operating system is Windows, Linux, or anything else.

[00:08:43]Microsoft no longer needed to win the operating system war. It had quietly repositioned itself to make that war irrelevant to its actual business.

[00:08:50]>> You said it has had some success in the mobile operating system. Google's last numbers were 900,000 [music] new activations every day. That's not some success.

[00:09:02]Right?