Howard Rheingold Quotes

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.

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.

I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.

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

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

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

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.

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.

I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.

The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

I started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

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

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.

There is a book yearning to come out of me: about how we can build the new collaboration economy, and the role of 'openness' in our quest for efficient use of resources and as a driver of innovation.

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.

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

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process.

'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.

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

The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us.

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.