Linus Torvalds

"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"

"Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!"

"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix."

"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs."

"Well, I probably won't get too good grades even without you: I had an argument (completely unrelated – not even pertaining to OS's) with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn :)"

"No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical."

"Dijkstra probably hates me."

"When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*""

"If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program."

"You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now."

"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program."

"It's a bird … it's a plane … no, it's KernelMan, faster than a speeding bullet, to your rescue. Doing new kernel versions in under 5 seconds flat …"

"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 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."

"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)"

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

"If you still don't like it, that's OK: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do."

"…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it."

"The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea."

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

"(In answer to the question: In the extreme case, if it was just you doing all the code, and the rest of the world quietly used it, would it make sense to give it away free? Unless you're particularly grateful for other free things you've got off the Net, would the answer be No?":)"

""Regression testing"? What's that? If it compiles, it is good; if it boots up, it is perfect."

"My name is Linus Torvalds and I am your god."

"If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won."

"I was thrown out of fourth grade because I couldn't write my own name, and it's been all downhill from there."

"I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination."

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well."

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

"I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it."

"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."

"To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs."

"Yeah. And as Linus once said: most numerical problems today in pure CPU cycles are actually 3D games. … It's not "incorrect" to say that you want the result faster, even if that result doesn't match your theoretical models."

"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."

"Hey, that's not a bug, that's a FEATURE! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, AND:"

"I allege that SCO is full of it."

"They are smoking crack."

"Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain."

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce."

"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."

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project."

"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit."

"The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease."

"A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die."

"2.6.: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two)."

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

"Don't bother. Bram doesn't know what he's talking about."

"Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)"

"I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants."

"I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual."

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."