It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

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.

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

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.