The offer that Steve Jobs put on the table two decades ago seemed perfect on paper. Apple was looking for talent to consolidate its new operating system and the creator of Linux was the ideal candidate due to his knowledge of Unix.
However, that contract had a clause that changed everything. And to accept the position and the million-dollar salary, Linus Torvalds had to abandon the development of his own core.
This condition reveals that it was not a simple collaboration, but rather a strategic move to deactivate the competition. At that time, Apple needed to legitimize its commitment to proprietary software and the existence of a free alternative posed a threat.
If they managed to remove the central figure from the project, Linux would lose its technical direction and leave the way clear for Mac OS X to become the dominant standard without rivals in the market.
The masterstroke that Apple never achieved
Torvalds rejected the proposal because he understood the risk it posed to software governance. An open source project needs a neutral leader who does not answer to the interests of a single corporation.
In addition, the GPL license guaranteed that no company could appropriate the code, because distributed development allowed improvements to come from anywhere in the world.
The separation between kernel and applications facilitated independent innovation at higher layers. All of this worked because there was a respected arbiter who made final decisions about what code went into the core of the system.
In fact, many free software projects have collapsed precisely because of the lack of that recognized leadership. Not because of authoritarianism, but because of the absence of shared points of reference that coordinate dispersed efforts.
If he had moved to Cupertino’s payroll, the developer community would have been fragmented and large companies like IBM or Intel would have stopped investing in a platform indirectly controlled by a rival.
And independence is what maintains the cohesion of the system. By saying no, Torvalds ensured that kernel development continued to be based on purely technical criteria and not Apple’s business needs.
In the end, This allowed the code to remain open so that anyone could improve, adapt and use it without proprietary license restrictions.. It was a hard blow for Steve Jobs.
Two opposite paths for technology
That refusal caused a total bifurcation in the industry that defines the current landscape. Apple continued on its path to create a closed, vertical and extremely profitable ecosystem focused on the end user, perfecting products like the Mac and later the iPhone.
On the contrary, Linux maintained its independence and became the invisible foundation of the entire digital infrastructure. Today, most companies, services and everything you can imagine depend on this decision, even every time you use the cloud, access a web server or use an Android mobile.
While Apple won the designer device battle, Torvalds’ independence allowed Linux to dominate everything else, becoming the universal standard for modern computing.