Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t happy with Nvidia. And he wants you to know it.
Late last week, at a hacker meetup in Finland, Torvalds laid into Nvidia, calling it “the single worst company” the Linux developer community has ever dealt with, complaining that the chipmaker doesn’t do as much as it could to ensure that its hardware plays nicely with his open source operating system. He even turned to the camera filming the event, flipped the company the proverbial bird, and dropped the proverbial F bomb.
“Nvidia, fuck you,” he said, as the room erupted with applause and laughter.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the chipmaker does offer Linux drivers for its hardware in some cases, and it offers a support page on its website for questions involving Linux.
Twenty years after creating Linux, Torvalds still oversees development of the operating system’s core code, and many still look to him a spokesman for the Linux community as a whole — though many others think his opinion is relatively unimportant now that so many businesses and individual developers are behind the widely used OS. In any case, he has never been one to hold back his opinion.
His Nvidia rant came after an audience member told Torvalds she had purchased a Nvidia graphics card two years earlier and that she had to build her own software drivers for using the card with Linux and push into the main Linux software code on her own. “We’re all playing in the same sandbox,” she said. “Why can’t we be nice to each other?”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Torvalds told her, before complaining that Nvidia was making a greater effort with Google’s Android Mobile operating system, which is based on Linux. “Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we’ve had with hardware manufacturers. And that’s really sad because Nvidia tries to sell chips, a lot of chips, into the Android market. And Nvidia has been the single worst company we’ve ever dealt with.”
Then he turned to the camera.
After dropping the F-bomb, Torvalds did temper his comments, saying that Nvidia isn’t the only company that’s not treating Linux as he would like. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying other companies are perfect,” he said. “They don’t feel Linux is a big enough market…. We can’t do anything about it. It’s life.”
Then he took a bit of shot at Microsoft — the historical rival of Linux. He said that Linux is the only operating system that uses the same kernel across all devices — and that this includes Microsoft Windows. “Nobody has ever done that before,” he said. “[Microsoft] claims they’re trying to [create a single kernel with] Windows 8. They’re lying. They’re not. They’re full of shit.”
For many years, Microsoft treated Linux as its mortal enemy. But in recent years, it has worked to play nicely with the OS and other open source software. Earlier this month, Redmond announced that it will now let developers run Linux on its Windows Azure cloud service.
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