“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
— Linus Torvalds
“A computer is like air conditioning – it becomes useless when you open Windows.”
“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
“Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.”
“Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”
“Those that can, do. Those that can’t, complain.”
“All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less.”
“Don’t hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don’t worry about timing.”
“If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”
“Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there’s only one of me.”
“I have an ego the size of a small planet.”
“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.”
“I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.”
“Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.”
“Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.”
“In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I’m talking to journalists I just say “programmer” or something like that.”
“My name is Linus, and I am your God.”
“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”
“I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it’s the only area where Linux hasn’t completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me.”
“An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.”
“I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.”
“Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.”
“People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.”
“An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.”
“In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.”
“I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It’s the right way to do things.”
“There are lots of Linux users who don’t care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.”
“Every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I’m going to live forever.”
“You won’t get sued for anticompetitive behavior.”
“Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.”
“The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.”
“Non-technical questions sometimes don’t have an answer at all.”
“I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or ‘big thinker.’ I don’t have any lofty goals.”
“I’m interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn’t started as any kind of rebellion against the ‘evil Microsoft empire.’”
“See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.”
“The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.”
“I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat.”
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I’ve won.”
“In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.”
“The way to do good basic design isn’t actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.”
“I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
“When you say ‘I wrote a program that crashed Windows,’ people just stare at you blankly and say ‘Hey, I got those with the system, for free.’”
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
“I try to avoid long-range plans and visions – that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.”
“In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.”
“Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.”
“I don’t actually go to that many conferences. I do that a couple of times a year. Normally, I am not recognized; people don’t throw their panties at me. I’m a perfectly normal person sitting in my den just doing my job.”
“I think the term “intellectual property” should be avoided, not because it’s a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn’t be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.”
“I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.”
“On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.”
“Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.”
“Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.”
“I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.”
“I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.”
“Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.”
“I’ve actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that’s because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.”
“With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.”
“Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.”
“I’ve never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don’t like the pay for use binary shareware programs.”
“I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.”
“So I’ve decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn’t really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous...”
“Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do.”
“The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.”
“A lot of people still like Solaris, but I’m in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.”
“I actually think that I’m a rather optimistic and happy person; it’s just that I’m not a very positive person, if you see the difference.”
“When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.”
“If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.”
“Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I’m telling you that the kernel is stable not because it’s a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.”
“Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you’re screwed.”
“I’m a technical manager, but I don’t have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.”
“It’s a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I’m only doing the kernel – I always found everything around it to be completely boring.”
“The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.”
“It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.”
“This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”
“Whoever came up with “hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on ‘your keyboard is buggered’ mode” should be shot.”
“Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.”
“By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don’t always agree with my decisions, they know I’m not working against them.”
“Artists usually don’t make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.”
“There are “extremists” in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do “free software” any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.”
“Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.”
“I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don’t find anything technically interesting there.”
“There’s innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I’m proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren’t in other operating systems.”
“Let’s put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is right or not, you are morally corrupt. Let’s not go there. We don’t base our morality on law.”
“I’d much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it’s right and not talking to the other.”
“There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.”
“I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called “Linux developers,” which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.”
“If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.”
“I don’t doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.”
“Personally, I’m not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren’t, they shouldn’t be, and microkernels are just stupid.”
“And what’s the Internet without the rick-roll?”
“A consumer doesn’t take anything away: he doesn’t actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.”
“I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.”
“One of the reasons that I really don’t mind that people are selling Linux commercially is exactly because it does make me feel good that people use the product.”
“The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don’t understand why everybody gets that wrong.”
“I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it’s so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.”
“I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.”
“What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.”
“Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don’t remember the last time I couldn’t walk around in shorts all day.”
“Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.”
“I’ve felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn’t have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.”
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