Linus Torvalds Quotes

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

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.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

I never got into Linux. I swear to God, it's only lack of time. I'm past the years of my life where I can really dig into something like running a Linux system. I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea; Linux people always think the way I want to think.

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

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

I've been very happy with the commercial Linux CD-ROM vendors linux Red Hat.

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

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

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.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

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.

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.

It doesn't cost anything to replicate code. So the companies that make code, that's why they've done so well. We take it for granted now, but why is it that code is free? It's because somebody built this self-replicating process.

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 think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.

Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.

There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.

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

The interesting thing about Android's design is how little we modified the kernel.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.