Linus Torvalds Quotes & Sayings

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing. — Linus Torvalds

My name is Linus, and I am your God. — Linus Torvalds

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. — Linus Torvalds

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux. — Linus Torvalds

I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose - there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime. — Linus Torvalds

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. — Linus Torvalds

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C. — Linus Torvalds

I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. — Linus Torvalds

I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. — Linus Torvalds

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. — Linus Torvalds

Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime. — Linus Torvalds

Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster. — Linus Torvalds

To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. — Linus Torvalds

I have an ego the size of a small planet — Linus Torvalds

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

The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children. — Linus Torvalds

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows — Linus Torvalds

In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems. — Linus Torvalds

If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. — Linus Torvalds

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one. — Linus Torvalds

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time. — Linus Torvalds

When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for. — Linus Torvalds

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

You won't get sued for anticompetitive behavior. — Linus Torvalds

I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene. — Linus Torvalds

I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in. — Linus Torvalds

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program. — Linus Torvalds

I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals. — Linus Torvalds

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

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too. — Linus Torvalds

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

You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever thing to do. — Linus Torvalds

I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously. — Linus Torvalds

Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'. — Linus Torvalds

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning. — Linus Torvalds

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. — Linus Torvalds

I'd like to point out that I don't think that there is anything fundamentally superior in the GPL as compared to the BSD license, for example. But the GPL is what I want to program with, because unlike the BSD license it guarantees that anybody who works on the project in the future will also contribute their changes back to the community. — Linus Torvalds

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux. — Linus Torvalds

I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended. — Linus Torvalds

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them. — Linus Torvalds

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal. — Linus Torvalds

I never felt that the naming issue was all that important, but I was obviously wrong, judging by how many people felt. I tell people to call it just plain Linux and nothing more. — Linus Torvalds

Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it. — Linus Torvalds

Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is right or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law. — Linus Torvalds

So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous ... — Linus Torvalds

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting. — Linus Torvalds

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs — Linus Torvalds

The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly. — Linus Torvalds

Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do. — Linus Torvalds

I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me. — Linus Torvalds

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring. — Linus Torvalds

I don't go to conferences quite as much as I used to: having a child and movin away from the university leaves me with less time, but I've tried to balance things out - not just spending time with Linux all the time, but having a real job and a real life at the same time. — Linus Torvalds

I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area. — Linus Torvalds

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well. — Linus Torvalds

I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable. — Linus Torvalds

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially. — Linus Torvalds

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born. — Linus Torvalds

Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. — Linus Torvalds

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there. — Linus Torvalds

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system. — Linus Torvalds

Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this. — Linus Torvalds

I like to think that I've been a good manager. That fact has been very instrumental in making Linux a successful product. — Linus Torvalds

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

That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle. — Linus Torvalds

The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code. You think v2 or later is the default. It's not. The _default_ is to not allow conversion. Conversion isn't going to happen. — Linus Torvalds

The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return. — Linus Torvalds

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. — Linus Torvalds

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. — Linus Torvalds

I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference. — Linus Torvalds

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

The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease. — Linus Torvalds

Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don't remember the last time I couldn't walk around in shorts all day. — Linus Torvalds

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"). — Linus Torvalds

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software. — Linus Torvalds

Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain. — Linus Torvalds

Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'. — Linus Torvalds

Today, I will offer free web hosting and developpement helps for
projects under Sourceforge — Linus Torvalds

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. — Linus Torvalds

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues. — Linus Torvalds

Any program is only as good as it is useful. — Linus Torvalds

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal. — Linus Torvalds

So I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, say it follows some basic rules like it supported paging , then I would be able to say, yes, Linux fundamentally supports that model. — Linus Torvalds

While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using, and that people find to be the best alternative for their needs. — Linus Torvalds

I lose sleep if I end up feeling bad about something I've said. Usually that happens when I send something out without having read it over a few times, or when I call somebody names. — Linus Torvalds

Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money. As such, I'm not very likely to make the same kind of money that Bill made. — Linus Torvalds

I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later. — Linus Torvalds

I don't see myself as a visionary at all. — Linus Torvalds

I'm perfectly happy complaining, because it's cathartic, and I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming. — Linus Torvalds

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral. — Linus Torvalds

I love making friends ... it's people I can't stand. — Linus Torvalds

Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid. — Linus Torvalds

If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there. — Linus Torvalds

I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well. — Linus Torvalds

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it. — Linus Torvalds

I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian. — Linus Torvalds

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out. — Linus Torvalds

Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did. — Linus Torvalds

In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself. — Linus Torvalds

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works. — Linus Torvalds

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. — Linus Torvalds