“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.”
“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.”
“I have an ego the size of a small planet.”
“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.”
“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”
“My name is Linus, and I am your God.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.”
“In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.”
“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.”
“Non-technical questions sometimes don’t have an answer at all.”
“You won’t get sued for anticompetitive behavior.”
“I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or ‘big thinker.’ I don’t have any lofty goals.”
“I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat.”
“The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.”
“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.”
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I’ve won.”
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
“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.”
“The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.”
“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.”
“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.’”
“I try to avoid long-range plans and visions – that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.”
“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.”
“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 am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.”
“In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.”
“On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.”
“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.”
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