"I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft — a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go."

"In Plan 9 and Inferno, the key ideas are the protocol for communicating between components and the simplification and extension of particular concepts. In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file system—anything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchy—and the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution. Inferno works similarly, but it has a layer of language interaction above it through the Limbo language interface—which is like Java, but cleaner I think."

"Unix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itself—you could type "go" and in a few minutes it would recompile itself. You had total control over the whole system. So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view. Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture."

"I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write."

"I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things."

"It does everything Unix does only less reliably."

"There's going to be no serious problem after this."

"'Gigabit' seems to mean 600 megabits. It's a VAX gigabit."

"Hi, this is Ken. What's the root password?"

"The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you."

"Work on Stuff that Matters"

"Healthcare is one of the areas where open data will potentially take off soonest and have the biggest impact."

"Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that."

"I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy and sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants."

"For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy."

"Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications... We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected."

"Create more value than you Capture"

"Learning JavaScript used to mean you weren’t a serious software developer. Today, not learning Javascript means the same thing."

"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."

"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-) […] Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second "F" for this term."

"Microkernels are not a pipe dream. They represent proven technology."

"If you just want to use the system, instead of hacking on its internals, you don't need source code."

"Will we soon see President Bush coming to Europe with Richard Stallman and Rick Rashid in tow, demanding that Europe import more American free software?"

"While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional."

"Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days."

"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack."

"But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a modern "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that."

"The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems."

"LINUX is obsolete."

"I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either."

"A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring."

""Linux is a leprosy; …" This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct."

"System designers who do not allow users to type far ahead ought to be tarred and feathered, or worse yet, be forced to use their own system."

"UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate."

""He" should be read as "he or she" throughout the book."

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

"However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process."

"Many security texts decompose the security of an information system in three components: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Together, they are often referred to as "CIA". [They] constitute the core security properties that we must protect against attackers and eavesdroppers—such as the (other) CIA."

"Fight Features. … The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small."

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

"I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience."

"Doing GPL work is doing charity work in our current legal and economic framework."

"You're about to experience chaos. [before farting in a police officer's face, while being photographed nude after his arrest]"

"Everything is deeply intertwingled."

"You can and must understand computers now!"

"I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages."

"We should not impose regularity where it does not exist."

"After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim Berners-Lee!"

"[Of the web] It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it."

"The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management."