Brian Behlendorf Quotes

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.

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

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.

A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free.

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.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

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.

Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 platforms historically undergo a lot of scrutiny, but there are a lot of advantages to having an open source platform from a security standpoint.

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.

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

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.

Our ultimate goal is extensible programming (EP). By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.

All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.