Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.