Computer Scientists

"Yes, I realize that there's a lot of insane people out there. However, we generally don't do kernel design decisions based on them. But we can pat the insane users on the head and say "we won't guarantee it works, but if you eat your prozac, and don't bother us, go do your stupid things"."

"It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Good taste doesn't go out of style"

"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."

"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."

"Is "I hope you all die a painful death" too strong?"

"I have an ego the size of a small planet, but I'm not _always_ right [...]."

"You try to claim that the GPLv3 causes "More developers", and that, my idiotic penpal, is just crazy talk that you made up."

"I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git."

"I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself."

"So the whole "We have a list and we're not telling you" should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"?"

"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."

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

"Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade – it's just a superior way of working together and generating code."

"It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own damn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways."

"Friends don't let friends use [gcc] "-W"."

"Gcc is crap."

"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")."

"… even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code (and as far as I know, it does, but since I think they have their design heads firmly up their *sses anyway with that whole microkernel thing, I've never felt it was worth my time even looking at their code), I don't believe a religiously motivated development community can ever generate as good code except by pure chance."

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

"EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)."

"…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] 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."

"I like colorized diffs, but let's face it, those particular color choices will make most people decide to pick out their eyes with a fondue fork."

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

"For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want."

"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."

"So LSM stays in. No ifs, buts, maybes or anything else. When I see the security people making sane arguments and agreeing on something, that will change. Quite frankly, I expect hell to freeze over before that happens, and pigs will be nesting in trees. But hey, I can hope."

"First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded – it's simply not what I'm interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good."

"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."

"Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who "reinvents" the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that "round" is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and "hipness" has nothing what-so-ever to do with it."

"95 percent of all software developers believe they are in the top 5 percent when it comes to knowledge and skills ."

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

"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children."

"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free."

"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

"And yeah, I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big. But doing the math - by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it."

"People are strange, and you can't fix people."

"It's memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" - nor memorial day - stops the merge window."

"I'm told that there are people claiming to "tokenize" my git repositories with my approval. I just want to clarify that that is not the case. I do not believe in monetizing my repositories. If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you. But I'm not selling source code."

"But I much prefer other people solving my problems for me. So me having to come up with a project is actually a failure of the world—and the world just hasn’t failed in the last 20 years for me."

"And no, I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit."

"How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you. You think you know better. But the current process works. It has problems, but problems are a fact of life. There is no perfect."

"Finally, I have a firm belief that most firmware developers are not actually humans, but are instead caged rodents fed a solid diet of crack cocaine. Because that would explain a lot."

"If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam. As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too."

"You're a smart person. I feel like I've given you enough hints. Why don't you sit back and think about it, and let's make it clear: you have exactly two choices here:"

"A third of a century. And it *still* isn't ready. I really need to get my sh*t together.."

"The day we finally get rid of HIGHMEM I will dance on its grave. I have hated that thing for a long long time."

"I will now go back to my cave and continue pulling stuff, I just had to do something else for a while. Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline asm."

"I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now."

"(In response to a post of the Linux Kernel infrastructre maintainer showcasing an online scam mentioning God) Damn. Who will take care of the kernel.org infrastructure now? God really didn’t think that one through."

"Life is good. We have a dishwasher again. Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking. I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many."