Steve Jobs tried to woo Linus Trovalds to work for Apple and sack Linux

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.

I said no,”  Torvalds remembers.

Linux is now the core of  Operating Systems such as Android, Chrome WebOS and a few others. Had A Jobs succeeded hiring Torvalds in 2000, Linux might not have made it to 2012.

Here is a Video of Linus Trovalds talking about Apple and Steve jobs