Linus Torvalds Quotes - Page 7

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

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.

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.

What commercialism has brought to Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

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 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.

I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.

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.

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.

You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools.

Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.

A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.

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.

Working in lock-step simply isn't a good idea. Never has been, never will be.

Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.

The cyberspace 'earnings' I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.

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

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.

One of the reasons that I really don't mind that people are selling Linux commercially is exactly because it does make me feel good that people use the product.

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.

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.

What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.

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

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

Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.