It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.

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.

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.

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.

I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up without having pre-conceptions of how I should deal with it. My only long-range plan has been and still is just the very general plan of making Linux better.

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

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.