Linus Torvalds
Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.
I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.
I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.
A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.
Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.
Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don't remember the last time I couldn't walk around in shorts all day.
I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.
I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.
A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open WindowsCollection: Air
Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.Collection: Complaining
Talk is cheap. Show me the code.Collection: Coders
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.Collection: Data
All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks lessCollection: Linux
Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.Collection: Fun
I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.Collection: Thinking
Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.Collection: Real
Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.Collection: Religious
Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.Collection: Simplicity
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.Collection: Practice
I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.Collection: Thinking
Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.Collection: Perfect
People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Mistake
The Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.Collection: Philosophy
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.Collection: Use
I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me.Collection: Taken
There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.Collection: People
I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Knowing
If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.Collection: Relevant
While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using, and that people find to be the best alternative for their needs.Collection: People
So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.Collection: Real
OK, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Thinking
The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.Collection: Laptops
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.Collection: Nice
Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they doCollection: Culture
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.Collection: Long
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".Collection: Competition
I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene.Collection: Linux
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.Collection: Technology
It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.Collection: People
What commercialism has brought to Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.Collection: Issues
I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.Collection: Use
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.Collection: Pain
You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools.Collection: Powerful
Working in lock-step simply isn't a good idea. Never has been, never will be.Collection: Ideas