Bill Hayden Quotes

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.

I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'

One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees - it's sort of like everyone's the same. Everyone's going to be the same, we're all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural, 'We're all okay.'

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

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless.

I really think the app store is kind of the killer app for Apple and for Google.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

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

It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.

I think they should separate Microsoft's application group from its operating system group.

Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software.

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

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.)

The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code. You think v2 or later is the default. It's not. The _default_ is to not allow conversion. Conversion isn't going to happen.

Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.

Linux has more than satisfied any small initial expectations I had. It's simply incredible how successful Linux has been, and how good a time I've had developing it and leading the project. It does take a lot of my time, but it's time I really enjoy spending, and Linux has continued to be challenging both technically and from a managing standpoint.

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.

...but it doesn't feel crazy to us. It feels like what we do.

Something like Windows is still an unbelievable asset but because the world is somewhat phone-centric, it's an asset that has to be managed very carefully to make sure that it's extended, and there are very interesting things that are being done with that.