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