Zawinski Quotes & Sayings

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy. — Jamie Zawinski

These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely. — Jamie Zawinski

You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out. — Jamie Zawinski

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? — Jamie Zawinski

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. — Jamie Zawinski

Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it? — Jamie Zawinski

My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. — Jamie Zawinski

Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation. — Jamie Zawinski

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. — Jamie Zawinski

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. — Jamie Zawinski

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. — Jamie Zawinski

Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates. — Jamie Zawinski

There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course. — Jamie Zawinski

Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them? — Jamie Zawinski

On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense. — Jamie Zawinski

I eat and drink at my desk, but I'm a tidy eater. — Jamie Zawinski

Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that. — Peter Seibel

C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string. — Jamie Zawinski

Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school. — Jamie Zawinski

To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that. — Jamie Zawinski

The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe. — Jamie Zawinski

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. — Jamie Zawinski

Linux is only free if your time has no value. — Jamie Zawinski

Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely. — Jamie Zawinski

I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card. — Jamie Zawinski

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. — Jamie Zawinski

If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works. — Jamie Zawinski

One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. — Jamie Zawinski

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla. — Jamie Zawinski

You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like. — Jamie Zawinski

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless. — Jamie Zawinski

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript. — Jamie Zawinski

I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do - does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there! — Jamie Zawinski

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use. — Jamie Zawinski

Your needs are big because the Internet is big. — Jamie Zawinski

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway! — Jamie Zawinski

You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. — Jamie Zawinski

Once a programmer had a problem. He thought he could solve it with a regular expression. Now he had two problems. — Jamie Zawinski

I use a really simple calendar program on my computer. — Jamie Zawinski