Open Source Quotes

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. ~ Erik Naggum

Nobody "manages" the open source contributors. ~ Daniel H. Pink

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia. ~ Megan Smith

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. ~ Mitch Kapor

In short, capitalism depends on ever-growing amounts of state intervention in the market for its survival, and the system is hitting the point where the teat runs dry.

The result is a system in which governments and corporations are increasingly hollowed out. And meanwhile, growing up within this corporate capitalist "integument," things like open source software and culture, open-source industrial design, permaculture and low-overhead garage micromanufacturing eat the corporate-state economy alive. An ever-growing share of labor and production are disappearing into relocalized resilient economies, self-employment, worker cooperatives and the informal and household economy. In the end, they will skeletonize the corporate dinosaurs like a swarm of piranha. ~ Kevin A. Carson

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill. ~ Mitch Kapor

The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us. ~ Mitchell Baker

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. ~ Linus Torvalds

Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts. ~ Tim O'Reilly

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. ~ Bill Gates

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. ~ Matt Mullenweg

If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name. ~ Safra A. Catz

The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on complexity; all Internet standards become festooned with complicating option sets that no one person can know in their entirety. The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on insufficient investment; safety review for open source code is rarely funded, nor sustainable when it is. The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on poor planning; wide deployment within critical functions but without any repair regime. ~ Dan Geer

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it. ~ Larry Wall

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

Android phones in China are more 'Android open source' rather than Android in the way we are all used to here. So a lot of phones don't have Google Play, etc. ~ Sundar Pichai

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

I am a patriot. I have always sought to serve my country, in theory a Republic. Learning that secrecy was evil rather than good was my first step. From there it was a steady march toward open-source everything. Now I see all the evil that secrecy enables in a corrupt Congress, a corrupt Executive, a corrupt economy, and a corrupt society. I see that the greatest service I or any other person can render to the Republic is to march firmly, non-violently, toward open-source everything. ~ Robert David Steele

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. ~ Linus Torvalds

Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

We weren't trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It's open source and it's free. We weren't trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it's just so much better. You're not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day. ~ Blake Ross

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.' ~ Richard Stallman

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. ~ Brian Behlendorf

I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future. ~ Robert David Steele

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

Open Source for the Enterprise ~ Anonymous

Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations ~ Miguel Reynolds Brandao

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. ~ Brian Behlendorf

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

I saw them do it. Chip vandals. Right there on Commerce, behind the main road...They cut his head open. They know I watched. ~ Anna L. Davis

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. "What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works," Torvalds said. "People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens. ~ Walter Isaacson

Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail. ~ Jon Johansen

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. ~ Matt Mullenweg

Global health players can become impervious to critique as they identify emergencies, cite dire statistics, and act on their essential duty of promoting health in the name of "humanitarian reason" or as an instrument of economic development, diplomacy, or national security. We are left, however, with an open-source anarchy around global health problems--a policy space in which new strategies, rules, distributive schemes, and the practical ethics of health care are being assembled, experimented with, and improvised by a wide array of deeply unequal stakeholders ~ Joao Biehl

Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. That's what we're up against in Iraq. We're up against a suicide supply chain. ~ Thomas Friedman

The power of Open Source is the power of the people. The people rule. ~ Philippe Kahn

If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source. ~ Peter Fenton

Open-source code is extremely well-adapted to service-oriented architecture. ~ Winston Damarillo

Computer science increasingly relies on its private corporate patrons who apply their own closed systems of peer review and criticism, with occasional results thrown over the wall. The closed walls of Redmond or Mountain View enable old-fashioned patronage of nature's secrets. The objectivity and scientific status of computer science is a chimera: we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in computer science, for they simply refuse to let us. ~ Samir Chopra

Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity's most spectacular open source project. ~ Gretchen McCulloch

When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders. ~ Scott Weiss

'Triple Agent' is a different kind of read because it is, at its core, a pure narrative, the story of an intelligence operation that unfolds over the course of a year and then goes badly wrong. There's a lot of 'news' in the book, including an account of drone warfare that is as detailed, in my humble opinion, as any in the open-source arena. ~ Joby Warrick

The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source". ~ Richard Stallman

If you want to build an open source project, you can't let your ego stand in the way. You can't rewrite everybody's patches, you can't second-guess everybody, and you have to give people equal control. ~ Rasmus Lerdorf

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. ~ Linus Torvalds

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. ~ Bruce Perens

For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux. ~ Barton Gellman

The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process. ~ Bruce Perens

A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve. ~ Isaac Asimov

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer. ~ Eric S. Raymond

Google released the basic algorithms for a program called TensorFlow for public consumption by the open-source community. TensorFlow is a set of algorithms that enable fast computers to do "deep learning" with big data sets to perform tasks better than a human brain. "By January 2016 we had a course online on how to use the TensorFlow open-source platform to write deep learning algorithms to teach a machine to do anything - copyediting, flying a plane, or legal discovery from documents," explained Thrun. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. ~ Larry Ellison

Liberation technology creates wealth, and open-source technology creates wealth. In both instances the 'center of gravity' for dramatic change toward resilience and sustainability is the human brain mass of five billion poor
the one billion rich have failed to 'scale.' The human brain is the one unlimited resource we have on Earth. ~ Robert David Steele

The "question" is the original open-source code. ~ Ted Agon

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. ~ James Gosling

What does it mean to be an 'open source' society? What does one mean when one says one has an 'open mind'? Open source means that its a society everybody can work on improving. It has a synergy that allows the best minds to float on top, since there is no entropical hierarchy of mediocrity - once everything stays fluid there is the odd chance for genius elements to actually lead. Such is the case now in Turkey. The protesters are a fluid synergy that have no entropical leadership, and thus the most brilliant PR moves are made by the resistance, who are opposed by the worst sort of mediocrity that is totally at odds with reality. An 'open mind' follows a similar process, but in this case the entropy hides in the hierarchy of ideas that is implanted in the brain: once a person follows mediocre ideas - such as the 'idea' that 'marriage is the meaning of life' or 'having a job is the purpose of existence' etc - then the phenomenon of the 'open mind' becomes already impossible, for there is an internal hierarchy of entropy present that will prevent any sort of original impulse to have the meaning it truly has. Hence, the only way to escape the mediocrity of ones own mind is to allow anything to build and revise it. ~ Martijn Benders

Let me be clear - Microsoft has no beef with open source. ~ Craig Mundie

The open source community is an example of the evolutionary processes we have been describing. The rules of the community establish a framework for competition, but do not specify or plan that software will result. ~ Yaneer Bar-Yam

An open source community arises from the synchronization of the individual interests of many parties. ~ Simon Phipps

I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life. ~ Chris Jordan

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

When will your sun come - to make everything reborn?
-The burn of your fingers pressed against my being-
I would like to fall asleep in your body again
And make of your smiles an open source
When my life is like a desolate desert
I would like to fall asleep by the light sand of your skin.
Your voice - your voice alone knows how to put an end to my anger
As your lips faint on the pains of my yesterday
When will you come to drape me in your radiant sun?
So that I find life in its first taste
(-The glow of your hair is a roof of moonlight.) ~ Emmanuelle Soni-Dessaigne

It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material. ~ Gus O'Donnell

In 2011, the NASSCOM team introduced me to Aloke Bajpai, who, like others on his young team, cut his teeth working for Western technology companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something - he just didn't know what. The result was Ixigo.com, a travel search service that can run on the cheapest cell phones and helps Indians book the lowest-cost fares, whether it is a farmer who wants to go by bus or train for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants to go by plane to Paris. Ixigo is today the biggest travel search platform in India, with millions of users. To build it, Bajpai leveraged the supernova, using free open-source software, Skype, and cloud-based office tools such as Google Apps and social media marketing on Facebook. They "enabled us to grow so much faster with no money," he told me. It ~ Thomas L. Friedman

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For ~ Adam Johnson

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. ~ Sundar Pichai

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

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. ~ Linus Torvalds

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

Our goal is not to assume leadership of existing institutions, but rather to render them irrelevant. We don't want to take over the state or change its policies. We want to render its laws unenforceable. We don't want to take over corporations and make them more 'socially responsible.' We want to build a counter-economy of open-source information, neighborhood garage manufacturing, permaculture, encrypted currency and mutual banks, leaving the corporations to die on the vine along with the state. We do not hope to reform the existing order. We intend to serve as its grave-diggers. ~ Kevin Carson

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. ~ Matt Mullenweg

Mathematics is Open Source. ~ Vishal Salgotra

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. ~ Bill Joy

ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic motivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation, ~ Daniel H. Pink

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. ~ Mark Hall

Life would be much easier if I had the source code. ~ Anonymous

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

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. ~ Linus Torvalds

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. ~ Brian Behlendorf

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. ~ Mitchell Baker

Open source isn't about saving money, it's about doing more stuff, and getting incremental innovation with the finite budget you have. ~ Jim Whitehurst

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. ~ Matt Mullenweg

I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows. ~ Steve Ballmer

I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends. ~ Curt Weldon

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. ~ Vint Cerf

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. ~ Jim Allchin

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. ~ Matt Mullenweg

What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. ~ Thomas Friedman

Don't be too stereotyped, be ready to explore new opportunities ~ Sunday Adelaja

If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [ ... ] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [ ... ]
First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio. ~ William Kamkwamba

You ooze joy and she is an open wound, shrill and wan, unfucked and unloved. ~ Caroline Kepnes

I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you'll read these stories and it'll be like 'What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?' And of course the point is that they don't, and they wouldn't, because they don't have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There's a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there - which I find fascinating and interesting and cool. ~ Lev Grossman

I try to be one of the exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable, who leave all the cages open. I tell myself: There's so much that you don't know, you can't know, you aren't ever going to know. ~ Kelly Corrigan

Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous new year by believing. Believe in yourself. And believe that there is a loving Source - a Sower of Dreams - just waiting to be asked to help you make your dreams come true. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas. ~ David Pietrusza

People who buy equity ETF shares in taxable accounts, such as a joint account or trust account, will find their tax bill may be slightly lower at the end of the year than if they had purchased the same amount in a comparable open-end index fund. ~ Richard Ferri

Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.
But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom. ~ Steven Erikson

I am so close, I may look distant.
So completely mixed with you, I may look separate.
So out in the open, I appear hidden.
So silent, because I am constantly talking with you. ~ Rumi

I worry about you a great deal, Mma. I worry that you will take all the cares of the world on your shoulders and that you will collapse under the weight. I worry that you will open your heart to so many people that eventually it will be full - crowded - and it will stop because there is no room for the blood to go round. I am worried that you will look after so many people that you will forget that there is one person who also needs looking after, and that person is you, Mma. I am worried about all these things. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire's far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor's eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia's Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.

Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they - and we - refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate f ~ Joe Bageant