Linus Torvalds Quotes - Page 9

Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.

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

I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.

Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don't remember the last time I couldn't walk around in shorts all day.

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.

A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with.

I never felt that the naming issue was all that important, but I was obviously wrong, judging by how many people felt. I tell people to call it just plain Linux and nothing more.

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

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

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

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.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

I'm a technical manager, but I don't have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.

I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.

I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.

I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.

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.

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

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

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.

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.

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.

I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.

On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.

Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.