Margaret Heffernan Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.

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

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

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 started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

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

Making things open-source brings the cost down.

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

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.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects.

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.