Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

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

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

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.

Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.

All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

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 do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

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

It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.

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

I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.

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

Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.'

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

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.

Microsoft loves Linux.

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

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.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

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.