Miguel de Icaza Quotes

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.

There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.

I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'

Making things open-source brings the cost down.

The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.

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

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

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.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.