Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

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

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.

The complaints I've had is that GitHub as a development platform - making commits, pull requests, keeping track of issues etc - doesn't work very well at all. It's not even close, not for something like the kernel. It's much too limited.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.

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

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.

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

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

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.

It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

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.

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

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

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.

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.

In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

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.