Linus Torvalds Quotes

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.

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.

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.

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.

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.

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.

I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.

In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.

Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.

I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.

Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.

I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.

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.

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.

If you have ever done any security work - and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" - it wasn't security work, it was - masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.

I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.

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.

Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system.

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").

I have an ego the size of a small planet

In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.

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.

One of the reasons that I really don't mind that people are selling Linux commercially is exactly because it does make me feel good that people use the product.

Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.

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

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.

Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.

I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters

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.

Any program is only as good as it is useful.

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.

I don't actually go to that many conferences. I do that a couple of times a year. Normally, I am not recognized; people don't throw their panties at me. I'm a perfectly normal person sitting in my den just doing my job.

I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.

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

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

The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.

I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.

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

Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.

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.

That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.

And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.

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.

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 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".

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.

Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster.

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 ...

The fame and reputation part came later, and never was much of a motivator, although it did enable me to work without feeling guilty about neglecting my studies.

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.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

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

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

If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.

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

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.

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.

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.

They are the motivational factors for everything in your life-for any­ thing that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is enter­tainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. Everything is moving in the same direction, but not at the same time. So basically sex has reached entertain­ment, war is close to it, technology is pretty much there. The new things are things that are just survival. Like, hopefully, space travel will at some point be an issue of survival, then it will be social, then entertainment. Look at civilization as a cult. I mean, that also follows the same pattern. Civilization starts as survival. You get together to survive better and you build up your social structure. Then eventually civilization exists purely for entertain­ment. Okay, well, not purely. And it doesn't have to be bad entertainment. The ancient Greeks are known for having had a very strong social order, and they also had a lot of entertainment. They're known for having had the best philosophers of their time.

So what this builds up to is that in the end we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.

There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.

I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.

No problem is too big it can't be run away from

I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.

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.

Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.

I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.

What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

Part of doing Linux was that I had to communicate a lot more instead of just being a geek in front of a computer.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about.

I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.

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

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

People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product,

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows

A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with.

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.