Top 236 Quotes & Sayings by Linus Torvalds - Page 3

I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later.

In many cases the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.

I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.

The way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.

When somebody who is different shows himself to be different in a good way, that's how development happens.

I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").

One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works but only want to use it is not only a tribute to how good Linux is, but it also brings up issues that I would never have thought of otherwise.

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money.

Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, then, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.

I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.

I love making friends.... it's people I can't stand.

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is "right" or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law.

This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

I started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.

When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.

I can't say that I like MicroSoft: I think they make rather bad operating systems - Windows NT is just more of the same - but while I dislike their operating systems and abhor their tactics in the marketplace I at the same time don't really care all that much about them.

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.

I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.

Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot.

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

I have an ego the size of a small planet.

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.

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.

Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.

So I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, say it follows some basic rules like it supported paging , then I would be able to say, yes, Linux fundamentally supports that model.

If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.

Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.

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.

The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.

The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.

Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

I'm simply too content doing what I want to do to really have a very negative attitude towards MicroSoft. They make bad products - so what? I don't need to care, because I happily don't have to use them, and writing my own alternative has been a very gratifying experience in many ways.

Today, I will offer free web hosting and developpement helps for projects under Sourceforge

I made very sure that I did not get involved with any of the commercial Linux companies, exactly so that I would be neutral and not ever seen as "working for the competition".

I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.

The cyberspace 'earnings' I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.

I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up without having pre-conceptions of how I should deal with it. My only long-range plan has been and still is just the very general plan of making Linux better.

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.

Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both.

OK, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.