Bill Gates finally meets Linus Torvalds at dinner of tech titans

What just happened? Given that there was a time when Microsoft called Linux a "cancer," it's little surprise that the Redmond firm's co-founder and long-time boss Bill Gates had never met Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. But that changed recently when the two attended a dinner, and it appears to have gone well.

Microsoft chief technical officer Mark Russinovich posted evidence of the historic dinner in a LinkedIn post. Dave Cutler, the legendary programmer and lead architect of the Windows NT kernel, was also present, completing this meeting of tech titans.

Russinovich jokingly wrote that while there were no major kernel decisions made, there's always the next dinner.

Things have come a long way over the last quarter of a century. In a June 1, 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't hold back his feelings on open-source software threatening ...