By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

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

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

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.

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.