A biography for Linus Torvaldshasn’t been written yet.
“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.'”
“No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.”
“I've been very happy with the commercial Linux CD-ROM vendors linux Red Hat.”
“I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.”
“If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.”
“I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.”
“In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.”
“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.”
“I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.”
“Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.”
“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.”
“Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.”
“I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.”
“I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.”
“Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.”
“I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.”
“Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.”