No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

My name is Linus, and I am your God.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

While we ended up having several core maintainers use BitKeeper - it was free to use for open source projects - it never got ubiquitous. So it helped kernel development, but there were still pain points.

Working in lock-step simply isn't a good idea. Never has been, never will be.

The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around "who can make changes." BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.