Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.

I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

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.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.