Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Torvalds frames “winning” the way an engineer does: not with a trophy, but with a reluctant port. The line is a small, sharp boast disguised as a conditional statement, and it lands because it flips the usual power dynamic. Microsoft, long the empire of the desktop, becomes the measuring stick for Linux’s legitimacy. If the monopolist has to accommodate you, you’re no longer a hobbyist movement; you’re infrastructure.

The specific intent is strategic swagger. Torvalds isn’t fantasizing about partnership so much as predicting inevitability: market gravity forces even ideological rivals to show up where users and developers are congregating. Microsoft doing “applications for Linux” would mean Linux has moved from the margins (servers, tinkerers, academia) into a mainstream platform worth paying engineers to support. That’s the win condition: not moral purity, not rhetorical victories, but adoption that compels competitors to spend money.

The subtext carries a second barb. Microsoft historically treated alternatives like Linux as threats to be neutralized, not courted. So the scenario implies capitulation, or at least pragmatism overwhelming dogma. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the idea that open source needs corporate approval: Torvalds positions Linux as the terrain on which others must play.

Context matters: this comes from the long era of Microsoft-versus-Linux culture war, when “embrace, extend, extinguish” anxieties were real. In that light, the quote is both taunt and forecast, confident that the future belongs to platforms that people actually choose.