Top 1200 Open Source Software Quotes & Sayings

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.

The Internet browser is the most susceptible to viruses. The browser is naive about downloading and executing software. Google is trying to help by releasing the Chrome browser as open source.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

Success for open source is when the term 'open source' becomes a non-factor in the decision making process, when people hear about Linux and compare it to Windows NT, and they compare it on the feature set and don't have much of an excuse not to use it.

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 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.

The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves - those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.

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

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

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.

Google is committed to open source and open APIs, and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place.

We do care about control and privacy. It's one of the reasons we are so focused on having our systems be open source, so you or someone technically savvy you know can verify what the software is doing.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

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.

The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.

Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it - a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all - you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.

My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.

If the DHS insists, as bureaucracies are apt to do, that open-source must be certified via a sanctioned, formal process, it will interfere with the informal process of open-source itself. It seems to me the DHS is trying to turn an open-source development project into a Microsoft (or IBM or Oracle) software development project. And we know what that means: more, not fewer, errors -- security and otherwise.

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.

It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.

The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.

My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.

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.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.

Users and entrepreneurs building new business models off the blockchain means that there are competing interests on how best to scale the network. Linux, also an open source software project, had similar growing pains.

Open platforms historically undergo a lot of scrutiny, but there are a lot of advantages to having an open source platform from a security standpoint.

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.'

WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.

I named my software 'EMAIL,' (a term never used before in the English language), and I even received the first U.S. Copyright for that software, officially recognizing me as The Inventor of Email, at a time when Copyright was the only way to recognize software inventions, since the U.S. Supreme Court was not recognizing software patents.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.

High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership.

I think the open software movement (and Linux in particular) is laudable.

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.

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

Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.

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.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.

Application-specific tokens, or app-tokens, are built on top of existing general-purpose blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the first time, open-source project creators can directly monetize their open-source network.

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.

Although the most advanced software innovation may take place in big cities with research universities, there is a lot of work concerning the application of software to business processes and the administration and maintenance of software systems that can be done remotely.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

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.

Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?