When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

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

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.

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.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows