Linus Torvalds Quotes

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.

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

I started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

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

I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.

Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.

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.

All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks less

I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.

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

I see myself as a technical person who chose a great project and a great way of doing that project.

Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

Part of doing Linux was that I had to communicate a lot more instead of just being a geek in front of a computer.

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and that has been paying my bills. Obviously a ''real job'' pays better than most universities will pay, but I've been very happy with this arrangement I get to do whatever I want, and I have no commercial pressures whatsoever doing this.

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.

Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.

I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

The complaints I've had is that GitHub as a development platform - making commits, pull requests, keeping track of issues etc - doesn't work very well at all. It's not even close, not for something like the kernel. It's much too limited.

I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'

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.

I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.

The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.

Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.

The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous.

I love making friends.... it's people I can't stand.

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 think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.

Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.

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.

Every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.

The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.

I really never wanted to do source control management at all and felt that it was just about the least interesting thing in the computing world .