Bill Joy Quotes

We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.

Most of the bright people don't work for you - no matter who you are.

There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?

Take responsibility for the things you build and invent.

Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.

Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don't have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it's true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.

And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.

If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.

A bomb is blown up only once—but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.

Operating systems are like underwear — nobody really wants to look at them.

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.

The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable.

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.

I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard.

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

Interleaf is based on the formatting process.

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.