Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

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

Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.

Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, then, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

The way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.