Disclaimer: I never liked Torvalds. I honestly believe free software would be better off without him.

That said.... My impression is Torvalds never cared about free software at all. The idea doesn't matter to him. He's fascinated by the fact that he leads a group of people who created a wonderful, advanced piece of software, and he's happy to see this code used in whatever product you could think of. Tivo.

He also doesn't acknowlegde that there's anything of importance in the free software ecosystem beside the kernel. For him, the kernel is the operating system. He doesn't run Ubuntu or Red Hat or Fedora... he runs Linux.

So while from my point of view freedom matters and alignment with desktop systems matters and working with upstream matters etc. etc. etc., he only looks at the kernel, says "Oh. Linux. How nice." and never cares about the rest.
This is why I fall in love with Maemo (in spite of all its shortcomings), while he - as I have to admit - has a much wider range of products to choose from.