I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.

I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.

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

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.

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.

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