Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates are Time heroes

TIME MAGAZINE named Linus Tovalds, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Turing as heroes of the last hundred years.

While few would argue against Alan Turing, and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, one has to question how exactly Bill Gates and Linus Tovalds have managed to make it into the running as "heroes".

Time seems to have some odd standards, particularly when heroes such as Bernard Montgomery are missing and Winston Churchill rubs shoulders with Jim Henson and Nelson Mandela with Princess Diana.

According to Time, Torvalds is a hero because when he was just 21 when he "changed the world" by writing the kernel of a new computer operating system called Linux.

More than 15 years later, Time claims Torvalds is the godfather of the open-source movement, in which software code is shared and developed in a collaborative effort rather than being kept locked up by a single owner. It seems to forget that Torvalds is only one member of a much larger movement which was going along without him.

Those who would say that Torvalds is no hero would probably back Time's decision that Gates is also a hero. Time admits that the myth that Gates was the inventor of Windows and DOS is not true when including him in its hall of fame. The magazine reserves some bile for Gates who it dubs an American "unoriginal".

Gates was the "the Bing Crosby of American technology who borrows a tune here and a tune there and turning them all into great boffo hits".

It says that by "heroic feats of repackaging and sheer Herculean blandness" has managed to get to the top on the back of the PC and by copying rival Apple to create Windows. This makes one a hero these days. Steve Jobs is no hero, according to Time. µ