What would have happened if Bill Gates was born 15 years later, somewhere in Finland. One boring summer he would set out to build an operating system, name it Linux and set if free for the world to use and play with.

His impact on the world would have been about as great as it is today, but he never would have topped the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.

But if Linux is so great, where are the Linux billionaires?

25 Apr 2007

At first glance they may not be any. Torvalds certainly doesn't rank very high on the Forbes list, and neither does GPL and GNU inventor Richard Stallman, or Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik

But 40 years from now, Bill Gates and all the other Microsoft billionaires may very well proof to be an abnormality, a footnote in history: in the early days of the IT industry, companies were able to artificially lock in users, forcing them to buy all software from a single vendor. This allowed them to create an illegal monopoly that had to be broken open by force. Consequently open standards emerged that prevented a repeat of the monopoly nightmares.

And as the link above points out, open source is today is powering the ideas of the latest generation of billionaires. Just look at Youtube and Google. But then open source is like air for the world's economy. You shouldn't notice it when it's there, but will dearly miss it if it isn't.

Matt Szulik - not a billionaire, but influential nonetheless.