Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.

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.

Any program is only as good as it is useful.

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

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later.

I don't go to conferences quite as much as I used to: having a child and movin away from the university leaves me with less time, but I've tried to balance things out - not just spending time with Linux all the time, but having a real job and a real life at the same time.

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

Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, then, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the "pay for use" binary shareware programs.

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.

I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

Linux has more than satisfied any small initial expectations I had. It's simply incredible how successful Linux has been, and how good a time I've had developing it and leading the project. It does take a lot of my time, but it's time I really enjoy spending, and Linux has continued to be challenging both technically and from a managing standpoint.

People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.

It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.

In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

So I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, say it follows some basic rules like it supported paging , then I would be able to say, yes, Linux fundamentally supports that model.

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.

On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.

Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both.

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

You won't get sued for anticompetitive behavior.

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

I've been very happy with the commercial Linux CD-ROM vendors linux Red Hat.

Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.

To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

The Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.

I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose - there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime.

Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is "right" or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law.

I like to think that I've been a good manager. That fact has been very instrumental in making Linux a successful product.

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.

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.

In many cases the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.

My name is Linus, and I am your God.

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

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.