Gates, Jobs, Torvalds: Who is Most Important?

Ian Wilson writes "silicon.com has launched its latest Agenda Setters poll which puts together a list of the top 50 people influencing tech. I remember Slashdot carried last year's poll - which was won by Steve Jobs. The full top 50 includes many of the usual suspects. Last year's winner Steve Jobs has slipped down to second place, but perhaps most interesting is the fact that the panel of judges couldn't separate Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates - they are tied in seventh place."

Comments

Linus Is much more important than Bill Gates

[randyflood]

Linus is much more important than Bill Gates!

Jobs is most important!!

[Ced_Ex]

Jobs, as in careers. Who doesn't want a stable steady challenging Job.

As for Steve Jobs? What has HE done for me LATELY?

Sounds like Moses's plan

[ianscot]

There's an Old Testament incident in which Moses lures all the believers in a certain religion or sect into a feast at a church, locks the doors, and burns the place down. God tells him that it'll be okay as long as they ritually purify their weapons afterward.

Time-honored approach. Vlad was just reading his Bible closely.

Linus

[gimpimp]

excuse my ignorance, but does Linux actually CODE stuff that goes into the kernel, or does he just say who gets to put stuff in it, and manage the source?

Lets say he's not technically knowledgeable enough to understand ALL the code in there, who's to say he's the best person to say what does/doesnt get in?

No, Osama bin Laden

[nightsweat]

An awful lot of the tech budget these days is going into war/espionage activities and worries about security.

Sadly, OBL and terror/the response/overreaction to terror is #1.

Re:Look at it another way . . .

[moosesocks]

Errrmm.......

Gates I will agree is influential in business. Let's not forget the huge number of CS projects going on at Microsoft too -- C# ain't half bad either (the linux community liked it enough to copy it)

Apple under Jobs, however, has made numerous contributions to UI and product design as well as the Unix core of OS X. He's also been innovative in the sense that he's used other people's existing solutions where they are adequate -- Darwin, CUPS, Samba, etc. and created his own where there are no adequate solutions (Aqua, Quartz, Cocoa).

Oh yeah. He released a Desktop Unix which became the most popular in the world within days of its release. What Linux had been trying to do for years, he accomplished in a day. Sure, it was many years in the making, but it can't be denied that OSX was produced from scratch by far far fewer developers than it took to turn windows 2000 into XP.

Torvalds contribution to technology is questionable. There are definite things in the Linux kernel which are very innovative from a CS standpoint -- many of which were made by torvalds. The man is without a dobut a world-class computer scientist, but weather or not his ideas are original is somewhat questionable. He only influenced linux because he had direct control over Linux. His influence lies in innovation in worldwide group collaboration -- actually ORGANIZING linux. I'm not sure if that's technology innovation. Its also worth noting that in general, linux seems to be by and large a 'me-too' version of all of the other operating systems. He pulled tons of great ideas together, but many of them had already been implemented on other systems. Think of linux as a re-implementation of other people's good ideas -- remember that it WAS supposed to be a free unix re-implementation. All he was trying to do was to re-create a commercial application for free (which was strongly helped by his socialist upbringing and free ride at university).