I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.

If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

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.

I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene.

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.

One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.

If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.