Jamie Zawinski Quotes

I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

I eat and drink at my desk, but I'm a tidy eater.

I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless.

If you give a cracker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is carve his initials in it. Fortunately, most crackers get over that once they're through puberty.

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.

You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.

Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it?

C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.

To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates.

Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely.

My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

Linux is only free if your time has no value.