Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

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

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.