The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.

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.

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster.

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.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.