Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
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.
I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.
I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.
If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.
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.
Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.
I'm perfectly happy complaining, because it's cathartic, and I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming.
I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.
I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.
The Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.
Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both.
In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.
An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.
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.
When somebody who is different shows himself to be different in a good way, that's how development happens.
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.
Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, then, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.
I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.
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.
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'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.
My name is Linus, and I am your God.
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
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.
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.
Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.
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.
If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.
The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.
I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me.
Only wimps use tape backup. Real men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.
I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.
I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.
The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.
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 have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.
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.'
Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.
Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.
By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.
On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.
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.
All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks less
I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.
That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.
There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works but only want to use it is not only a tribute to how good Linux is, but it also brings up issues that I would never have thought of otherwise.
The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
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.
There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.
I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.
Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.
This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
I can't say that I like MicroSoft: I think they make rather bad operating systems - Windows NT is just more of the same - but while I dislike their operating systems and abhor their tactics in the marketplace I at the same time don't really care all that much about them.
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 is like sex: It's better when it's free.
I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole.
Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
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").
Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.
Any program is only as good as it is useful.
Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.
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.
I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.
The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot.
UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.
You won't get sued for anticompetitive behavior.
In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.
We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is "right" or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law.
I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.
If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.
Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
I love making friends.... it's people I can't stand.
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.
People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.
Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.
There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.
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.
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.
Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.
I have an ego the size of a small planet.
I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.
I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.
I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.
Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.
I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.
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 Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code. You think v2 or later is the default. It's not. The _default_ is to not allow conversion. Conversion isn't going to happen.
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.
In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.
Today, I will offer free web hosting and developpement helps for projects under Sourceforge
Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
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.
If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.
When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.
Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.
If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.
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.
I see myself as a technical person who chose a great project and a great way of doing that project.
Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.
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.
A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows
Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.
People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.
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.
Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.
No problem is too big it can't be run away from
In many cases the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.
Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
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'.
To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.
The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question.
