Theo de Raadt Quotes

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

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

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

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.

I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away.

All software sucks.

Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software.

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.

The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.

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

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.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

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

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

It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

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

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.