Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed.

I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.

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.

I really never wanted to do source control management at all and felt that it was just about the least interesting thing in the computing world .

I made very sure that I did not get involved with any of the commercial Linux companies, exactly so that I would be neutral and not ever seen as "working for the competition".

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and that has been paying my bills. Obviously a ''real job'' pays better than most universities will pay, but I've been very happy with this arrangement I get to do whatever I want, and I have no commercial pressures whatsoever doing this.

When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.