Miguel de Icaza Quotes

When people think of Mozilla, they generally think of the browser, but Mozilla is really much more than that. Mozilla is of interest to people who want an end-user application like our browser that's not tied directly into the Windows platform.

I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.

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

I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.

In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent.

Yes, I definitely believe that it has some good cross-platform properties. Object orientation was one of the techniques I used to make Python platform independent.

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.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

Microsoft loves Linux.

On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.

Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.

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.

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

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.

I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality.

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.

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.

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.

We're excited by the success of WhatsApp on top of Android. Amazon brings services like Kindle on top of Android. It's a competitive world and a lot more complex than people realize. When you run a platform on scale, you have to make sure it's truly open. That way, not only do you do well, so do others.

As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.

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

In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.