Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

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

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

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.

Open-source is a means of production.

One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

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.

What is interesting to me is to find ways to work with early-stage innovators to build from the edge and work on tomorrow's ideas.

Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.

It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.

To succeed in the tech industry, you start businesses, make money, and make smart investments. But to succeed in the tech community, you do and build awesome things, are generous with your time and efforts, and make a point of making space for strangers - without any expectation of payback.

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.

In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren't happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn't exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn't have existed without the openness of the platform.

The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.

I approached Yahoo as a learning experience. Everything at every stage of the game affects what you do next. At Yahoo, I learned a lot about social search and met a lot of amazing people - some are now entrepreneurs with companies I subsequently invested in.

Part of the thing that's magic about TechStars is it's about a community that wants to make itself better.

When the market turns down, a lot of people lose jobs... and that's the time people become entrepreneurs. Downturns end up being the best times to start companies.

Google is committed to open source and open APIs, and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place.

At the end of the day, if you want to create more IP and more invention, you need to connect between research and entrepreneurs. People who are going to take a risk.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.