What Does Bill Gates Think of Linux? A Closer Look at the Microsoft Founder's Real Stance
Bill Gates has gone from calling open source a threat to Microsoft's business to watching his own company embrace Linux. Here's what he actually said — and what changed.
Ask people what Bill Gates thinks of Linux and you'll get two cartoonish answers: either he hates it with the fire of a thousand antitrust lawsuits, or he's quietly come around and now loves it. The truth is messier and more interesting. Gates has spent three decades reacting to Linux — first as a strategic threat, then as a philosophical disagreement, and eventually as a reality Microsoft had to live with. His personal opinion and his company's official posture didn't always move at the same speed.
Let's untangle what he actually said, when he said it, and why it matters more than you'd expect for anyone choosing an operating system today.
The short answer
Bill Gates has never been a Linux fan in the way an enthusiast is. But he's also never been the snarling anti-open-source villain the internet sometimes paints him as. His consistent position, across interviews from the late 1990s onward, is roughly this: the free software movement — the idea that all commercial software is unethical — is something he fundamentally disagrees with, but open source as a development model and Linux as a product are real, capable, and worth taking seriously.
That nuance gets lost because the most quotable Gates moments are the combative ones.
The early years: Linux as an existential threat
In the late 1990s, Microsoft genuinely worried about Linux. This wasn't paranoia — Linux was eating into the server market, Apache was crushing Microsoft's IIS web server, and the cost of "free" was hard to argue against in data centers.
The clearest window into Microsoft's internal thinking came from the Halloween documents, a set of leaked internal memos published in 1998 by open-source advocate Eric Raymond. These weren't authored by Gates personally, but they reflected the strategy of the company he ran. The memos openly described open source as a "long-term credible" threat and discussed tactics to compete with it — including the infamous "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach of adopting open standards, adding proprietary extensions, and using that leverage to lock competitors out.
Gates himself, in this era, framed the debate around incentives. His core argument: if software can't be sold, who pays the engineers to do the unglamorous work — security patches, driver support, documentation? He genuinely believed (and still does) that commercial incentives produce better-maintained software at scale. You can disagree with that — the existence of the Linux kernel itself is a strong counterargument — but it was an honest economic position, not just corporate spin.
The "cancer" line that wasn't Gates
One quote gets misattributed to Gates constantly: the claim that Linux is "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." That was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, in a 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. Ballmer's specific target was the GPL license, not Linux as software. Gates was more measured in public — he criticized the licensing philosophy but rarely reached for that kind of language.
What Gates actually said about open source
In a 2005 interview, Gates drew a careful distinction that he's repeated in various forms: he supports open source code availability for educational and development purposes, but objects to licenses that, in his words, mean "no one can ever improve the software" commercially. He was talking about the copyleft nature of the GPL, which requires derivative works to also be open.
He even pointed out, accurately, that Microsoft shares a lot of source code with governments, partners, and universities. His complaint was never "people shouldn't see the code." It was "people shouldn't be forced to give away the value they create."
This is the heart of his view. Gates respects Linux the artifact. He rejects the free software movement's moral framing — the Richard Stallman position that proprietary software is inherently wrong. Those are two very different things, and conflating them is where most internet arguments go off the rails.
How Microsoft's stance flipped — and where Gates fits
Here's the twist. By the time Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft's relationship with Linux had completely inverted. The company that once treated Linux as a cancer now runs more Linux instances on its Azure cloud than Windows ones. Microsoft open-sourced .NET, shipped the Windows Subsystem for Linux so developers can run a full distro inside Windows, joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, and bought GitHub — the home of nearly every major open-source project on earth.
Where was Gates during all this? He'd stepped back from day-to-day management in 2008 and left the board in 2020. So the dramatic pivot wasn't his doing. But he hasn't pushed back on it either. In later interviews, Gates acknowledged that open source had proven itself and that Microsoft's old hostility didn't serve it well. The pragmatic Gates — the one who always followed the market — accepted that fighting Linux head-on was a losing strategy.
If you want a deeper history of how this corporate U-turn happened, the team at It's FOSS has tracked Microsoft's open-source moves for years and documents the shift better than most.
So does Bill Gates use Linux?
No. And this answers one of the most common follow-up questions directly: Gates uses Windows. He helped build it, he profited enormously from it, and there's no credible indication he runs a Linux desktop at home. For everyday computing he's a Windows and Microsoft 365 user. His foundation work and his personal device choices are all firmly in the Microsoft ecosystem.
That's not hypocrisy — it's consistency. Gates never claimed Linux was bad software. He just preferred the commercial model he spent his life building, and he genuinely likes the product his company makes.
People also ask
What does Steve Jobs think of Linux?
Jobs had a complicated relationship with Unix-like systems, which is more relevant than it sounds — macOS is built on a Unix foundation (Darwin/BSD), so Apple ships a Unix system to millions of people. Jobs admired the technical elegance of Unix but had little patience for the open-source desktop ethos. He believed in tightly controlled, polished, integrated hardware-and-software experiences, which is the opposite of the "build your own system from parts" Linux philosophy. He reportedly saw the Linux desktop as fragmented and unfinished for ordinary users. So like Gates, Jobs respected the underlying technology while rejecting the everything-should-be-free worldview — he just chose a more curated path with NeXT and later Apple.
Does Elon Musk use Linux?
Indirectly and constantly, yes — though probably not on his personal laptop. Tesla's in-car infotainment systems run on Linux. SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon flight computers run a customized Linux. Starlink terminals run Linux. The point is that Musk's companies depend on Linux for mission-critical, real-time systems precisely because it's free to customize, auditable, and battle-tested. Whether Musk personally daily-drives a Linux desktop is unclear and mostly irrelevant; his engineering organizations are deeply Linux-dependent. This is the quiet reality behind the whole "do tech billionaires use Linux" question: their products almost always do, even when their personal machines don't.
What OS does Bill Gates use?
Windows, paired with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft's broader software stack. He's confirmed across multiple interviews that he uses standard Microsoft products day to day. No Linux desktop, no macOS — the man uses what he built.
Will Linux be replaced by AI?
No, and the question slightly misunderstands what each thing is. AI is software that runs on an operating system; Linux is the operating system. They're not competitors — they're layers of the same stack. In fact, the AI boom has made Linux more dominant, not less. Nearly every large language model on the planet is trained and served on Linux servers, usually running NVIDIA GPUs on a Linux kernel. The world's fastest supercomputers run Linux, 100% of the TOP500 list as of recent years. If anything, AI is one of the strongest forces cementing Linux's position in computing infrastructure for the next decade.
What this means if you're choosing an OS today
Here's the practical takeaway buried in all this billionaire trivia: the people who built the proprietary giants never thought Linux was bad technology. They competed with it commercially, but they all quietly relied on Unix-like systems where it mattered. That should tell you something about Linux's actual quality.
Today the decision is far less ideological than it was in Gates's combative years. You don't have to join a movement or pick a side in a culture war. You can simply ask whether Linux fits your needs — and for a huge number of people, it does. If you're weighing the trade-offs honestly, our breakdown of Linux vs Windows and whether you should actually switch walks through the real differences without the tribalism.
If you've decided to try it, the modern onboarding experience is nothing like the 1998 install nightmares the Halloween documents would have you imagine. A beginner can be up and running in under an hour. Start with our guide to the best Linux distros for beginners in 2026, then follow our step-by-step Linux installation guide. Once you're in, a quick pass through the 30 essential Linux commands every beginner should know will get you comfortable fast.
The bottom line
What does Bill Gates think of Linux? He thinks it's capable software built on an economic philosophy he disagrees with. He feared it when it threatened his business, criticized the licensing that he felt destroyed commercial value, and ultimately watched his own company embrace the very thing it once called a threat. He doesn't use it, he never championed it, but he never dismissed its quality either.
The richest irony is that Microsoft — Gates's life's work — is now one of the largest contributors to and beneficiaries of the open-source world. The kid who wrote that 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" complaining that people were copying his software for free now runs a company that gives away enormous amounts of code. Linux didn't win the argument by changing Gates's mind. It won by becoming too useful to ignore.