“Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.”
— Linus Torvalds
“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.”
“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...”
“Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.”
“Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.”
“I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.”
“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.”
“Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I’m a technical manager, but I don’t have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.”
“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.”
“I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.”
“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.”
“I’ve never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don’t like the pay for use binary shareware programs.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A lot of people still like Solaris, but I’m in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.”
“Whoever came up with “hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on ‘your keyboard is buggered’ mode” should be shot.”
“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.”
“Artists usually don’t make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.”
“Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.”
“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.”
“If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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?”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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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