Linus Torvalds Quotes

While we ended up having several core maintainers use BitKeeper - it was free to use for open source projects - it never got ubiquitous. So it helped kernel development, but there were still pain points.

In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.

If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.

patents are an arm in the hands of large enterprises which use them in order to block all inconvenient innovation or to restrict the development of free software. The American experience with software patents is particularly negative and merits reflexion

We are in a period when old questions are settled and the new are not yet brought forward.

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

I was a programmer.

If people are given the right circumstances and the right track and the right melody, it's about the conviction. It's not necessarily about being a God-given virtuoso.

I want to change Italy and get the economy back on track.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

My heart has always been in programming and marketing.

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).

I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate.

Sport is an essential element of education.

Great issues develop from small beginnings.

The world got side-tracked from development issues during the post-9/11 crisis period.

The concept of the "information society" is both vague and all-embracing. Different participants meant different things by it. In practice, though, World Summit on the Information Society only dealt with a small number of issues: ICTs and human rights (to some extent), ICTs and development (to some extent), infrastructure finance and Internet governance. Very large aspects of what might have been included in the "information society" were not really discussed.

A more just world is possible. In most of the global issues, and also in so many of the development issues I'm involved in in our region, the young people that I am working with are seizing the tools at their disposal and trying to use them well, for issues far larger than their immediate personal benefit and concerns. That's what gives me hope.

There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious.

In the late 60s, 70s and possibly early 80s, social scientists were interested in researching the diffusion of innovation and studying the link between applied research and policy and program development. Recently there has been less interest in these issues and we feel that this interest must be rekindled.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around "who can make changes." BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.