Linus Torvalds Quotes

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.

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

Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.

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

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.

Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

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.

I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.

The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".

Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.

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.

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

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

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

For me, open source is a moral thing.

Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.'

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

I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

I have really become a huge believer in the power of open source.

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.

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels