Hacker News Reader

Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

I once compared Linus Torvalds' net worth to Warren Buffett's net worth. I think they are both extremely capable individuals in their fields. Torvalds earns about 10 million per year. With that income, it would take Torvalds 12k years to reach the same net worth as Buffett (about 124 billion).

Put differently, Buffett could personally fund 10k open source contributors 200k per year for their lifetime (60 years) if he wanted to.

So maybe that's the solution? Convince billionaires that open source software is a philanthropic endeavor?

View on HN

"Torvalds earns about 10 million per year"

I'm curious how he earns so much? That seems like a lot for someone who is associated with FOSS, even if they are so influential/skilled.

Yeah, shocked the heck out of me, if accurate.

Red Hat gave him a bunch of stock way back when. I'd guess whatever he makes at the Linux Foundation is a rounding error compared to that.

Ah, that makes more sense.

> Torvalds earns about 10 million per year

Source?

There's no source since this is a made up number. It massively overstates his income.

>So maybe that's the solution? Convince billionaires that open source software is a philanthropic endeavor?

Is it, though? This isn't the attitude we have towards things like USB-IF or the Unicode Consortium, both of which are non-profits that were started by for-profit companies trying to solve a technical challenge for their own, joint benefit.

Hardware and software companies need a working operating system to be able to make money.

You would need to convince them that it is a philanthrocapitalist endeavor. If they see how it can help them avoid taxes and steer policy to benefit their investments, they might join on. Unfortunately open source SW goes pretty much opposite in the direction Gates and Buffet want to go. They want license everything and make us dependent on it as a subscription.

If Torvalds wants to earn more, he should focus on making Linux more user friendly rather than more Linux-geek friendly.

Linux could get dramatically more resources if they could just drop their big-ego'd "CLI is god" mentality. Yes, Linux is a powerhouse OS, but it only appeals to a tiny slice of the population.

How goes greater userbase intrinsically mean more resources and not simply a much larger pool of angry emails from users encountering issues with their hardware?

Because it will attract the talent of people who want to fix the OS that 40% of their users use.

There are currently 3 billion active Android devices, and they are powered by Linux. There is a helicopter on Mars that runs Linux. I think Linus has done fine focusing on what he is focused on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com