Tim O'Reilly Quotes

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.

Limit use of shareware and public domain software to systems without fixed disks. If you do use them on fixed disks, allocate separate subdirectories... Public domain or shareware software should never be placed in the root directory.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

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

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

I really think it is amazing that people actually buy software.

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.

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.

So far, Indian companies have focused more on customer application. This needs to shift to packaged software for sectors such as banking and financial services.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software.

Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.

In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.

Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.

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

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

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

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

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.