Linus Torvalds Quotes

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

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

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

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.

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

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

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.

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.

The best remote companies I've seen do almost everything online, via email and telephone. But they also get together face to face on a regular basis.

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

Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail.