The way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.

I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference.

Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.

I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.

I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.

In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.

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.