Linus Torvalds Quotes

If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

I'm simply too content doing what I want to do to really have a very negative attitude towards MicroSoft. They make bad products - so what? I don't need to care, because I happily don't have to use them, and writing my own alternative has been a very gratifying experience in many ways.

While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using, and that people find to be the best alternative for their needs.

If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money.

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.

Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.

No problem is too big it can't be run away from

What commercialism has brought to Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

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 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.

A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with.

We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money. As such, I'm not very likely to make the same kind of money that Bill made.

What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.

I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole.

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows

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

I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.

Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

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.

I'd like to point out that I don't think that there is anything fundamentally superior in the GPL as compared to the BSD license, for example. But the GPL is what I want to program with, because unlike the BSD license it guarantees that anybody who works on the project in the future will also contribute their changes back to the community.

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

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

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.

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.

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] 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.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?

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.

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.

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.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.

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 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.

And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.

There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious.

Software is like sex: It's better when it's free.

You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever thing to do.