96 Quotes by Eric S. Raymond

It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.

Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.

The organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent

As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.