Linus Torvalds Quotes (1969-)

“A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.”

“I allege that SCO is full of it.”

“OK, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.”

“Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are... Moral of the day: RTFM.”

“Dijkstra probably hates me.”

“I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.”

“…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.”

“I was thrown out of fourth grade because I couldn't write my own name, and it's been all downhill from there.”

“The day we finally get rid of HIGHMEM I will dance on its grave. I have hated that thing for a long long time.”

“See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)”

“Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings).”

“I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”

“I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.”

“95 percent of all software developers believe they are in the top 5 percent when it comes to knowledge and skills .”

“People say that you should not micro-optimize; but, if what you love is micro-optimization, that's what you should do.”

“Obsessing about things is important, and things really do matter, but if you can't let go of them, you'll end up crazy.”

“Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot.”

“It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.”

“Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.”

“Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.”

“I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.”

“It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.”

“The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.”

“Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice.”

“I know most of us are preparing for Christmas, but give it a whirl, ok? How important are those presents (and that family) anyway?”

“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.”

“The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.”

“[...] I really hate big laptops. I can't understand people who lug around 15" (or 17"!) monsters. The right weight for a laptop is 1kg, no more.”

“In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.”

“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.”

“Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend.”

“I may be a huge computer nerd, but even so I don't think education should be about computers. Not as a subject, and not as a classroom resource either.”

“There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.”

“There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.”

“You're a smart person. I feel like I've given you enough hints. Why don't you sit back and think about it, and let's make it clear: you have exactly two choices here:”

“It's a bird … it's a plane … no, it's KernelMan, faster than a speeding bullet, to your rescue. Doing new kernel versions in under 5 seconds flat …”

“If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.”

“The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question.”

“I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination.”

“But this is definitely another of those "This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Al-biwan Ke-Viro, you're my only hope" issues. Al? Please don't make me wear that golden bikini.”

“One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging [...] making binaries for linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass.”

“That's the spirit. Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me. Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.”

“Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix.”

“Finally, I have a firm belief that most firmware developers are not actually humans, but are instead caged rodents fed a solid diet of crack cocaine. Because that would explain a lot.”

“The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea.”

“I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself.”

“...today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement. Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them.”

“How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you. You think you know better. But the current process works. It has problems, but problems are a fact of life. There is no perfect.”

“But I much prefer other people solving my problems for me. So me having to come up with a project is actually a failure of the world—and the world just hasn’t failed in the last 20 years for me.”

“Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn't perfect, but I've skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it's a work of art.”

“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.”

“And no, I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit.”

“"the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and "all that [diversity] stuff is just details and not really important."”

“It's Easter Sunday, which means that we're all about to gorge on mämmi (Right? You *do* have your carton of mämmi ready to go, don't you?).”

“BULLSHIT. Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should have - several of them bear your name. [...] As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. [...] WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?”

“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)”

“So the whole "We have a list and we're not telling you" should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"?”

“Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”

“Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me.”

“Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using PREEMPT_RT.”

“You try to claim that the GPLv3 causes "More developers", and that, my idiotic penpal, is just crazy talk that you made up.”

“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.”

“It’s Caturday. Minky is no longer with us, but this is probably my favorite picture of her.”

“Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!”

“Well, I probably won't get too good grades even without you: I had an argument (completely unrelated – not even pertaining to OS's) with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn :)”

“Yeah. And as Linus once said: most numerical problems today in pure CPU cycles are actually 3D games. … It's not "incorrect" to say that you want the result faster, even if that result doesn't match your theoretical models.”

“EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI).”

“Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here's the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there's really nothing better to do in between meals.”

“[GPL] version 3 was not a good "here we give you version 2" and then we try to sneak in this new rules and try force everyone to upgrade; that was the part I disliked. The FSF did really sneaky stuff, downright immoral in my opinion.”

“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*"”

“An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program.”

“The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances [*].
[*] In other words, it's an Oracleism.”

“We're not masturbating around with some research project. We never were. Even when Linux was young, the whole and only point was to make a *usable* system. It's why it's not some crazy drug-induced microkernel or other random crazy thing.”

“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.”

“Crying that it's an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was.
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.”

“XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.”

“Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.”

“C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.”

“Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
[...]
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix.”

“I realize that lawyers are brought up (probably from small children) to think that "technically true" is what matters, but when you make public PR statements, they should be more than "technically" true. They should be honest. There's a big f*cking difference.”

“Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.”

“I will now go back to my cave and continue pulling stuff, I just had to do something else for a while. Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline asm.”

“I tend to call myself an anti-visionary because to me, what is much more important than vision is execution. I've always quoted Edison saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration [...].”

“So LSM stays in. No ifs, buts, maybes or anything else. When I see the security people making sane arguments and agreeing on something, that will change. Quite frankly, I expect hell to freeze over before that happens, and pigs will be nesting in trees. But hey, I can hope.”

“I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] … but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”

“So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.”

“The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.”

“Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.”

“[In response to http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/07/northeast_portland_man_who_str.html Good job. More public indecency, less TSA, that's what I say.”

“It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own damn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways.”

“Yes, I realize that there's a lot of insane people out there. However, we generally don't do kernel design decisions based on them. But we can pat the insane users on the head and say "we won't guarantee it works, but if you eat your prozac, and don't bother us, go do your stupid things".”

“Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant*. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here.”

“If you have ever done any security work – and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" – it wasn't security work, it was – masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.”

“I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.”

“Life is good. We have a dishwasher again. Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking. I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.”

“Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who "reinvents" the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that "round" is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and "hipness" has nothing what-so-ever to do with it.”

“The fact is, the people who have created open source and made it a success have been the developers doing work - and the companies that we could get involved by showing that we are not all insane crazy people like the FSF. The people who have *destroyed* projects have been lawyers that claimed to be out to "save" those projects.”

“Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.”

“C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.”

“Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?”

“I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" – anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").”

“It’s Sunday, which means no more cat pictures, and instead just the usual -rc release. Prize for odd bug this week goes to an otherwise harmless off-by-one buglet that then in turn confused clang sufficiently to generate bogus code that our ‘objtool’ checks then (correctly) complained about it. This is the kind of exciting lives that us kernel developers lead.”

“If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam. As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.”

“(In response to a post of the Linux Kernel infrastructre maintainer showcasing an online scam mentioning God) Damn. Who will take care of the kernel.org infrastructure now? God really didn’t think that one through.”

“I'm told that there are people claiming to "tokenize" my git repositories with my approval. I just want to clarify that that is not the case. I do not believe in monetizing my repositories. If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you. But I'm not selling source code.”

“Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is!”

“It looks like the IT security world has hit a new low. If you work in security, and think you have some morals, I think you might want to add the tag-line "No, really, I'm not a whore. Pinky promise" to your business card. Because I thought the whole industry was corrupt before, but it's getting ridiculous. At what point will security people admit they have an attention-whoring problem?”

“I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
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. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE.”

“I've been personally pretty disappointed with ARM as a hardware platform, not as an instruction set, though I've had my issues there, too. [...] What I wanted to upgrade to was Acorn Archimedes ... the thing that gave ARM its name.”

“So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.”

“It's memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" - nor memorial day - stops the merge window.”

“I like colorized diffs, but let's face it, those particular color choices will make most people decide to pick out their eyes with a fondue fork.
And that's not good. Digging in your eye-sockets with a fondue fork is strictly considered to be bad for your health, and seven out of nine optometrists are dead set against the practice.
So in order to avoid a lot of blind git users, please apply this patch.”

“No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.”

“I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it.”

“I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!" Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually not a people person.”

“Why don't we write code that just works? Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code that has years of testing? This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable. [...] Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines". Those two really do work.”

“… even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code (and as far as I know, it does, but since I think they have their design heads firmly up their *sses anyway with that whole microkernel thing, I've never felt it was worth my time even looking at their code), I don't believe a religiously motivated development community can ever generate as good code except by pure chance.”

“I’m actually a horrible MIS person, and I would never want to maintain my own server. I’m a programmer for chrissake! The same way you should fear me if I hold a soldering iron, you should be very very nervous if I were to do any server management... and on a similar note: not only am I not much of a MIS person, I’m also not much of a social networking person. I foresee a lot of disappointment in the future of any followers of this account.”

“Pet peeve of the day: all the people talking about how ChatGPT is not “conscious” and how it does not “understand” what it is saying, but just putting likely-sounding words together into likely-sounding sentences. Extra bonus points for using an example of a math problem as a way to show how these AI chat-bots talk about things they don’t really understand. The irony. The lack of self-awareness. It burns.”

“2.6.: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).
2..x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)
.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely everything, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").”

“Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.”

“Sometimes "pi = 3.14" is (a) infinitely faster than the "correct" answer and (b) the difference between the "correct" and the "wrong" answer is meaningless. And this is why I get upset when somebody dismisses performance issues based on "correctness". The thing is, some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it doesn't matter. While performance almost always matters. And I absolutely detest the fact that people so often dismiss performance concerns so readily.”

“I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really -- I mean -- I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am.”

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.”

“…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] 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.”

“I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.”

“To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.”

“This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.”

“For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want.”

“You don't know what you are talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you've talked to "experts" or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don't know what they are talking about. But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me. [...] Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies. And if you insist on believing in the crazy conspiracy theories, at least SHUT THE HELL UP about it on Linux kernel discussion lists.”

“Somebody is trying to kill all the kernel developers.
First we had two earthquakes - fine, this week God not only hates republicans, but apparently us kernel developers too. But we kernel developers laugh in the face of danger, and a 5.5 earthquake just makes us whimper and hide in the closet for a while.
But after we've stopped cowering in the closet, there's a knock on the door, and the conference organizers are handing out skate boards, with the innocent explanations of "We're in San Diego, after all".
If that's not a sign of somebody trying to kill us, I don't know what is. Handing out skate boards to a bunch of geeks sounds like a seriously misguided thing to do.”

“The desktop hasn't really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I'm known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That's why, to me, it's not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it's a really hard area to enter. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down.”

“(In answer to the question: In the extreme case, if it was just you doing all the code, and the rest of the world quietly used it, would it make sense to give it away free? Unless you're particularly grateful for other free things you've got off the Net, would the answer be No?":)
I don't necessarily think so. It might be true in certain niche areas, but almost any project will give a developer that "feel good" feeling when he has users and he feels he is doing something worthwhile. I really don't think you need all that much "quid pro quo" in programming - most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.”

“Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade – it's just a superior way of working together and generating code.
It's superior because it's a lot more fun and because it makes cooperation much easier (no silly NDA's or artificial barriers to innovation like in a proprietary setting), and I think Open Source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy. Like science, Open Source allows people to build on a solid base of previous knowledge, without some silly hiding.
But I don't think you need to think that alchemy is "evil." It's just pointless because you can obviously never do as well in a closed environment as you can with open scientific methods.”

“First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded – it's simply not what I'm interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.”

“I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent... Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties... I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc). Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”... And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me... I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor... I’m not interested in yet another “runs in a terminal” editor, or some even older editor (ie “real” emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years.”

“Hey, that's not a bug, that's a FEATURE! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, AND:
• Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
• A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest").
• Massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error").
I'm deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style.”