Linus Torvalds Quotes - Page 4

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.

You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever thing to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, I will offer free web hosting and developpement helps for projects under Sourceforge

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?

When somebody who is different shows himself to be different in a good way, that's how development happens.

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.

One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.

I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

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.

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.

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

I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.

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

I have an ego the size of a small planet.

I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.

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 individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

I'm simply too content doing what I want to do to really have a very negative attitude towards MicroSoft. They make bad products - so what? I don't need to care, because I happily don't have to use them, and writing my own alternative has been a very gratifying experience in many ways.